Queen in her heart
by Cosmic Wind
Summary: "I love you, my strong and brave Queen", he whispered. "Always will. Be careful!" His beautiful, blue eyes held on to hers, but when she reached out to touch his face, he was gone, and the whirling mists closed around her. FINISHED
1. Evanescence

**Queen in her heart**

A divine saga in seven parts

"I love you, my strong and brave Queen", he whispered. "Always will. Be careful!" His beautiful, blue eyes held on to hers, but when she reached out to touch his face, he was gone, and the whirling mists closed around her.

**1. Evanescence**

_Happy New Year!  
Happy New Year!  
Happy New Year everyone!_

Taking a small step back, sharp stiletto heel cracking the thin crust of ice beneath, she regarded the candle-lit scene in front of her while grabbing the fur cape, pulling it tighter over her shoulders against the cold midwinter night. Her friends. Gathered at the terrace to her large penthouse suite. Linda letting off another of those Asian floating lanterns in the sky where it joined its umpteen likes in an orange nebula. Natek filming it all with his smartphone camera, his white knitted cap sitting askew on too much dark-brown hair. Fireworks were flashing against the starry night sky, and beneath them Stockholm was sparkling like a slow-mo version of the pyrotechnics above. Thousands of thousands of lights reflecting in the water, glittering like the gemstones in a magic crown of a fairytale king.

Bolero was playing on the surround system, its distinct and well known cadence mixing with the random rattling of firecrackers being set off, the smell of gunpowder blending with that of perfume, after-shave and candlewax before it reached her nostrils.

This was her world, her town, her home, her friends. Still it felt so strange, so distant. So unreal - intangible. Unfathomable as if she didn't really fit in here. As if a coincidence had brought her here. As if she had merely been dropped down trough time and space and relocated to this place, and that her real home was somewhere else, far away – and yet so near. As if she just needed to reach out with her hand, letting the thin surface of reality crack beneath her gold-painted nails to show her where she really belonged. The place from where she had journeyed to come here on some mission she could not recall.

"Hannah!" Emanuel's deep voice shattered her thoughts. "More Champagne?" She turned towards the sound, facing the tall, slightly rotund man with blond, curly hair reseeding over a pale forehead and gold-brimmed glasses gleaning as they reflected the many flames of the thick white candles.  
"Yes please," holding out her glass, she watched him fill it, the sparkling slightly golden beverage streaming down from the opening of the moist-covered green bottle. Another one was opened up at the same time, the well-known pop of the cork followed by cheerful handclaps.

"Erik!" Linda's soprano mixing with the applause. "How much Champagne did you really get?"  
"Enough," a debonair tenor resounded from the other end of the terrace. "Enough for us to celebrate that we're beginning another year. A hopefully better year than the one we're putting behind us."  
"Can it be better," Monica's laughter pierced through the air. "For some, I mean." She was already more than reasonably tipsy. Bordering on drunk to be true. "Not all are as happy as you, Erik and Linda!"

Hannah sighed. She didn't want Monica to create another scene. Not on New Year's eve. However she knew the redhead teacher was right. Erik and Linda were successful, and they did nothing to hide it. Occasionally it tended to be a bit too much. Monica stood a bit to the left, glowed hand cradling her glass of Champagne as if she was afraid it would fly away together with the orange lanterns, which were now disappearing out over the water towards the city hall with its significant tower.

"Ladies and gentlemen," Hannah called out, letting her eyes slid over the gathered ten on the terrace. "I think it's time for another toast. And to hope that some of those wishes sent with the lanterns are to come true."

However she knew that one of the wishes would not become true.

The one she had written.

One single word.

_Health._

However not for herself.

But for her best friend, Agnetha.

Agnetha, who was dying from the cancer. The cancer they all thought she had conquered. Became liberated of by the miracle that was 21th century medicine. However the tumor had returned, and with a vengeance.

"This will be my last New Year, Hannah," Agnetha had said in the kitchen before she and her husband Claus had left. They didn't want to stay over the strike of twelve, didn't want to mingle with Hannah's other friends and their superficial glee. The up-and-coming Linda and Erik, cutting gold with their investor companies. The talkative journalist Emanuel and his timid Thai wife Ilsa. Monica, who drank more and more and was turning bitter since her divorce. Natek and Karl, the frivolous gay couple with their thousand and one ongoing projects, ranging from modern circus to Eurovision Song Contest contributions. The twins Chantale and Renate who couldn't wait to go out clubbing and finally Logan, struggling with the Swedish and never giving up his tries to get Chantale in bed.

Now Agnetha's tear-stricken face somehow overlaid those merrier ones on the terrace. So while Hanna raised her glass, she recollected the hug she had received from her best friend, before Agnetha and Claus had left a bit more than an hour back. Agnetha had felt so gaunt, so fragile. She, the pudgy one who had always wished to be slim. _Don't wish too hard_...

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

_"I love you, my strong and brave Queen", he whispered. "Always will. Be careful!" His beautiful, blue eyes held on to hers, but when she reached out to touch his face, he was gone, and the whirling mists closed around her._

The reminiscence of the dream flashed before her as a back marker catherine wheel careened through the sky outside the kitchen window and Monica's drunken hysteria fired off in a shrill laughter.  
"I mean, Logan, gimme a break, she so jellicle!"  
"Monica, please! I like you as a friend," Logan replied. "A good friend, I don't want to spoil that. Now, let me call a cab for you."  
"I can ride the subway," the teacher replied. "We can ride together you and I!"  
"Monica..." Logan's sigh was pretty audible, no doubt was he cringing at her blunt innuendo.

Hannah put the last of the Champagne flutes in the dishwasher and hit the ON button. The big machine thundered alive in a gush of white noise and she dried off her hands on a towel before leaving the kitchen to say good night to the last of her friends. Chantale and Renate had left soon after the strike of twelve, ready to hit the clubs, then Erik and Linda had hurried home to relieve the baby sitter and with them went Emanuel and Ilsa. The others had stayed to play scrabble. IRL game with a board and markers, a bit more genuine than the cell phone hype.

Now it was a bit past three o clock and Monica had failed in her mission to seduce Logan. Karl and Natek were tired as well, tired and content, their jovial bantering fading out as they were disappearing with the downgoing elevator. Leaning against the door frame, Hanna watched Logan helping Monica on with her parka and her long, green dickie, which she wound several turns around her neck.  
"Take care of her", Hanna mouthed as the drunk woman turned her back and walked over to the elevator, calling it back up to the apartment again. Logan smiled silently and made a salute with two fingers across the forehead. Then they too disappeared.

It was 3:30 in the night and the year was 1213. Hannah was going to bed, and she wondered if the DREAM would come tonight again.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

_Around them cosmos swirled. Up was down and down was up. The shadow across his face was hard, rendering half of it in complete blackness, the way it did where there was no air. Still the remarkable beauty of his face was intact, and she let it burn through her retina and into her mind, to always remember. Always remember if anything should go wrong.  
"Do you remember how to do it?" he asked of her.  
"Yes, yes," her voice rung clear and firm, reverberating of confidence she didn't feel. "I close the portal from my side, you from your side, and the mortal realm will be protected while you, my friends take on the Malaikin. And then I just make sure the Crystal is safe at Olympos and wait for you to open the portal again when you are finished."_

_"Darling," he swept some hair away from her pale temple.  
"Let's not procrastinate. I'll do it now. And I see you so much sooner." She took his strong hand, removed it from her face and placed a gentle kiss upon his index finger. The warm and well known texture. She lingered perhaps a bit too long._

_Then she let go and with her right hand she lifted the blue crystal as she stepped through the opening, seeing the turquoise sky there on the other side of the undulating mists of time-space. Frost broke out across her arms and painted itself up over her face as she passed through the opening like so many times before. But this time she knew it was different. She could feel it in all her essence, how this great Change manifested itself across the round opening like small, blue sparks crackling around the edges. _

_"I love you, my strong and brave Queen", he whispered. "Always will. Be careful!" His beautiful, blue eyes held on to hers, but when she reached out to touch his face one last time, he was gone, and the whirling mists closed around her. As she fell down towards the mountainside, she saw the mighty opening up there close and fade away, melt and white out until the only thing seen was the blue of the sky and the clouds._

_Landing hard she felt how she dropped the crystal and she saw it roll away from her down the hillside, pulled by gravity into the chasm below.  
"No!" she reached out to grasp it, but too late, and a flash of blue sapphire blinded her before she closed her eyes._

No! Hannah's eyes fluttered open and she found herself staring into the well-known off-white sloping ceiling of her own bedroom, the dream memory fading fast and turning into nothing more than shattered evanescent fragments. With a throaty moan, she turned in bed, untangling herself from the duvet, which had played boa constrictor in the night and wrapped itself around her legs and feet. The red digital figures on her alarm clock showed 10:53. God, she had slept too long. And that dream. It had been oddly detailed this time. She could recall his hand across her face, the skin she had kissed, the blue eyes holding onto hers. However she had lost his name. Again.

"Why can't I remember you?" she asked out loud as she sat up in bed. Outside it was raining, the water drumming persistently on the skylight and there was the deep rolling sound of an airplane passing above. "You're the only one I have, and I don't even remember your name. I don't even know if you're real or if you're nothing but a dreamwork. Still, you keep coming back to me all the time. And I know the love in your voice is real. And your eyes, I would recognize those eyes anywhere."

"Oh, look at me," she then heard herself say, in another voice. Realistic and more scolding. "I talk to a dream man, do I cling to him because I've lost everything else?" involuntarily Hannah's eyes drifted over to the photo of her parents and her little brother Joly. The tsunami had taken them that horrid day in Thailand in '04. Eight years had passed, since those whom she had loved the most had disappeared out of her life. And soon her best friend Agnetha would be gone too, nothing but a memory.

"Then there'll only be you left, my nameless beloved," she complained pityingly while she stood up and walked across the cold floor to the hanger with her dressing gown. Shivering against the chill she gratefully wrapped the soft, ruddy terry around her naked body and continued out in the living room, her bare feet patting softly over the white-speckled black marble.

Ouch! The new year didn't start that well, at least not when it came to the weather. Outside it was gray and wet. Uninspiring. Transparent worms of water painting themselves across the large glass surface, and out on the terrace the rain was soaking the candle leftovers, three empty bottles of Champagne and killing what little snow there was left. Beyond it, Stockholm looked washed out and gloomy, as if a collective hangover had manifested itself in its colour-less disillusion.

Breathing upon the glass, Hannah watched white condensation coat it and hide the outside. Using her index finger she painted a heart there. Another ephemeral tribute to her name-less beloved.  
"I have nothing to write in that heart," she said. "Nothing but..."

"_I just make sure the Crystal is safe at Olympos and wait for you to open the portal again when you are finished."_

I just make sure the Crystal is safe at Olympos.

"Olympos. That word – a name. That's a clue!"

The fervent jolt through her mind made Hannah almost bounce back from the window, not caring that the heart she had drawn was disappearing fast as the condensation was fading. Swirling around, she almost ran into her office, removing the manga translation she was working with from the office chair, and powering up her laptop.

As soon as her little faithful had stirred alive and connected with the world outside, she went to Google, typed in the word _Olympos_ and then spent a quarter of an hour there clicking some links which appeared interesting. Slowly something began to dawn upon her. Olympos being that mountain in Greece where the old gods had believed to reside. Could her dreams have anything to do with the old gods?

And why?

She had dreamt those dreams as long as she could remember. The dream of the man with his face halfway hid in shadows and the backdrop of the bright, starlit sky. So much more starlight than in real life. The man with the deepest, bluest eyes who had told with his kind, resounding voice that he loved her. The gentle hand caressing her cheek. Hannah had clung to this recollection trough the hardships of her life. Through the anguishes of her teens when she had felt like a misfit, through the loss of her family and trough the ups and downs of her professional life and when she had learned of Agnetha's cancer.

This nameless man had been her only constant. Her offbeat shelter, her personal religion. The one she had always known would return. To be there again in the dark of the night, telling her he loved her. Ever so often had she hoped that he would one day become real, that she would find herself face to face with him while being wide awake.

Only lately – the dream had grown so much more elaborated. More detailed. Today for the first time had she remembered herself mentioning Olympos. Olympos and that strange blue crystal, the one she so unfortunately had dropped. Now she clearly recalled its primary blue colour, how that last flash had burned into her retina, making her waking up.

Hannah had googled blue crystals and blue crystals + Olympos, but it had returned very little. Still she knew that in the dream had she fallen down on Mount Olympos, lost that important crystal which probably was operating the portal. And then...

And then?

And then she had ended up in this life, with the only recollection of her old life and her real beloved an evanescence of reappearing dreams.


	2. Quiescence

**Quiescence**

A/N In this story, Athena is Hera's daughter. The reason for that will be clear later.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

_"Let's not procrastinate. I'll do it now. And I see you so much sooner." _

They echoed in his mind, reverberated through his soul. These, the last words he had heard her say. His Hera. His brave and magnificent beloved Queen. Without hesitation had she taken the sparkly blue crystal from his hand and let the gravity of the Mortal World get the hold of her, pull her inside of the Portal like so many times before. This time to seal it from her side, to shelter the fragile beings of the planet Earth.

With his heart almost stopping, he had seen her falling down through the whirling blue skies towards the ground, the fear in her lovely eyes, which she so eagerly was trying to hide. However it had reflected his own dread and he had wanted to call out for her to stop. To come back to him! But too late, the Portal had closed and faded away until nothing remained but the glistening stars in the sky. Shut until he and he alone would chose to use the Red Crystal to open it again.

It was nothing they had ever done before, a hard and conceivably dangerous act. However this was dangerous times and the demand high for daring plans. The Malaikin, their old alien arch enemies, had been back and more numerous and resourceful than ever. Once again had these malevolent and pugnacious beings set their eyes upon their realm, steadfastly convinced that they were going to invade it this time. The only thing standing in their way had been the little group of guardians called Olympians.

It had been a lengthy, terrifying and unforgiving battle; however they had been successful thanks to the brilliance of Athena's strategies. Like so many times before, the Olympians had triumphed, they had annihilated the Malaikin attackers to the very last one, eradicated them, not letting anyone of the foes return to where they had come from.

Zeus walked across the shiny, black and white squared floor, past the octagonal pool, where the almost unnaturally still water reflected the starlight, and stopped by the edge of the landing. Here two pillars higher than the rest carried a gilded vault. Way up in the air it arched and glittered softly in the many lamps and lanterns that lit up the night. Looking down from the edge of the broad stairs and out over the waste gardens, he felt the balmy night wind lift his long, white cloak and billowing it widely behind him. He rested a hand on the cold white marble of a pillar, rubbing his fingers slowly across the slick surface while lifting his face, gazing up in the sky towards the point where the Portal used to be. Now there was nothing, but a faint, dark speck in the sky, the jetty which had used to hold the rounded opening to the Earth Side.

It was time to open up the Portal again. Let Hera come home. He just hoped she was all right. That the fall through the realms and the forces of the closing portal hadn't harmed her.  
"Darling," he said. "I'm coming to you. We'll be together again, and everything is going to be fine. The after-war quiescence of Olympos can need something to shaken it alive again. Like your vibrant spirit."

By these words, Zeus leaped out from the landing, like a shining comet he traversed the sky and headed out in the airless, weightless space where the shadows became harsh and the only thing heard was his own heartbeat. Relentlessly pointing out how lonely he was without his beloved by his side.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

_Landing hard on the rocky ground of the Olympos mountain slope she felt the air slam out of her lungs and her lower arms lash out to take the lot of the impact. The next moment she found herself dropping the primary blue crystal and seeing it roll away from her down the tuft-covered hillside, pulled by gravity into the chasm below.  
"No!" she reached out to grasp it, but too late, and as it fell away, a flash of blue sapphire light blinded her before she closed her eyes. _

No! Not again!

It was the third night in a row now the dream had come to Hannah. Every time it had been just the slightest more detailed, a tad more clear and consistent. In spite of that she could still not remember the name of her blue eyed beloved up in the skies. He meant everything to her, and it was obvious the feelings had been mutual, because he had been so very reluctant to let her go.

Still there are certain things in life you just have to do, and this had been one of them. Hannah and her nameless love had to protect this world from these mysterious and malicious Malaikin. That very word sent shivers down her spine.

_"We have sighted their ships," the woman with the flying blond hair was saying, her radiant sapphire eyes apprehensive and her striking face marred with her worry. "They are several times more of them than the last wave, the one we just hit back, and which cost us so much. This time I've no doubt that the Malaikin know of our strengths and of our weaknesses. They'll be so much harder to defeat now."  
"Don't despair, sister," the raven haired man was saying, and as he turned towards her, the deep red of his cloak reflected off his face, giving it a horrid, crimson sheen as if being drenched in blood. "You see, we know theirs too. We can kick them all the way back to that dirt rock they call Malaika and send them the message, that we are sick of their puny weapons and tiresome attacks."_

Another part of her dream – or was it a memory – had remained this time. Hannah recalled those two – the brother and the sister - and she felt deeply moved. It was almost that tears sprang out from her eyes. She had sensed a strange kinship with this duo, a desire to reach out to them and hold them.

Hannah had googled the word Malaikin finding little of use and she had waded through the vast ocean of information about the gods of Olympos, finding more, however it had been hard to sort and structure it and try to apply it to her dreams. One evening, she found herself writing the name Zeus in a notebook, trying to discern if it made her feel anything. Nonetheless the descriptions and the images of the godly king didn't really fit her recollection of the man in her dreams. All those images of a bearded, enthroned god said her absolutely nothing. Other than that long beards were so not her type.

Too soon the holidays were over and life was returning to normal programming and with it the came work, friends, the gym, and all the other things Hannah filled her days with. When her family had died, she had inherited a small amount of money. So upon returning from Thailand and her mourning period, only to find that she had lost her job while being away, she had used the money to make an old dream come true. She had started her own publishing company. Bou-ken (adventure) Publishing was importing manga from Japan to Sweden and she and her two Japanese partners did most of the translations. It wasn't flourishing, manga wasn't as hot as it had been about five years ago, but she did fine. She could pay for her Japanese translators, for the printing and distribution of the paperbacks and for some marketing. And she made enough for the down-payments on her parent's penthouse, so she could keep that one as well.

Since Hannah worked mostly from home, one of her ways to meet people was the Wednesday After Work with the Small Business' Guildhouse. The Guildhouse was located in a small 18th century building on a narrow, cobblestoned back street at one of the many lesser Stockholm islands. It was a three-story, yellow sandstone building of the appealing but insignificant kind which the Guildhouse shared with a cosmetic surgery's clinic and a jazz record label.

It was here Hannah networked, found out the latest 'who's doing what' and tied new contacts. Or just socialized. This first Wednesday of the new year was no exception. Entering trough the blue inner door to the Guildhouse's part of the building, the first things she became aware of were the clammy warmness, the smell of wet clothes in the foyer and the buzz of a plethora of voices from the inside. The premises were bathed in a welcoming and mellow dusk of red and orange lights. Some left-over Christmas decorations still hung from the half-open glass doors leading into the main room, however they looked sad and forlorn, as if they knew their days were numbered.

Hannah made her way through the thong of people and up to the bar, where she hiked up her short, pin-striped pencil-skirt, climbed a high chair and ordered a beer from the small-statured and bald middle-aged man who had been working there as long as she had been frequenting the place. Sten, which was the name of the bartender, was fast to fill up her glass, remove the excessive foam with a plastic stick and handing over the beverage in return for her cash money. Then she found herself conversing with Simon and Benny, two men who were working with diving tours, in the pacific during winter time and in the Stockholm archipelago during the summers.

"So what are you doing at home in January," Hannah asked Benny and drank from her beer, the mellow, slightly bitter liquid invigorating and relaxing her.  
"I became a dad on boxing day, so naturally I had to come home," The athletic 30something man swept away strands of long, blond hair from a weathered, angular face, a tattoo of an owl glimpsing on his forearm as the shirt collar slid back. "Lina and I had since long decided we wanted to have li'l Sandra in Sweden, so Lina has been living at home now during the last months of her pregnancy and then I came up in mid-December to not miss the birth."  
"Congratulations," Hannah smiled, raising her glass, watching the light refract in the golden beverage.

As he too raised his glass, Simon's trade-mark toothpaste grin split up his sun-burnt face. He was still not 30 and naturally looked less worn yet also less world-wise than his older colleague.  
"So we decided to close the shop for the holidays," he cut in. "And I took the chance to return to the old land and see my folks as well. You know, I haven't been at home for Christmas since 2004. I've almost forgotten it got this cold."  
"This year is far from the worst," Hanna said. "You should've been here in '10. I swear, it was like Hell frozen over. So how are Lina and Sandra?"  
"Oh, they're fine. However Lina's been complaining about the strangest dreams. Oddly clear and persistent. And about Greek gods!"

"Greek gods," Hannah almost coughed on her beer. "As in Zeus and those people?"  
"You know about them?" Benny lifted a groomed brow.  
"Well, yes, I've read some." she shrugged. "Mostly work related. Care to tell what those dreams are about?"  
"Don't think she's crazy, but she dreams that they come here again. Back to Earth, I mean. And they want something, but Lina's not sure what it is they want."

So she was not the only one having these dreams. Putting down her beer, Hannah thought it over. Perhaps she wasn't that special, perhaps there was no certain connection to the man in the starry sky. Perhaps the things she dreamt was just something somebody else had experienced and which several people all over the world kept on dreaming now. In a way it made her sad. On another level, it made her – expectant. Maybe there was something going on after all.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

"You started the Facebook group 'Dreaming of Olympos'," the talk show host Maia Terrada turned to the blonde lady in her early thirties who had just taken her place in the sofa next to the ice hockey pro who had been interviewed earlier. "Now, why is that?"

Snapping awake from her semi-doze, Hannah reached for the remote and cranked up the volume, almost spilling her cup of cooling herb tea. Now, this was exactly what she wanted to hear. As the camera shifted and the guest came in view again, the legend beneath her on the screen was shown, 'Elizabeth Lund'.

"I began to have those dreams in June," came the reply, Elizabeth Lund's Dalecarlia accent barely audible. "During Midsummer I talked about them with some friends, and it turned out to be more than I who kept receiving them. So I started a group where we could discuss them, and today we have more than 3500 members. And not just from Sweden, but from all over the place."

"What is it you and the other members on the site keep dreaming then?" Maia Terrada asked.  
"All kinds of things, with the Greek Gods being the lowest common denominator. Mostly it's about them turning up and showing their willingness to help. With all kinds of problems. My own dreams have been evolving around the problems I've been having with my own writings. My children's books. Others in the group have been given relational guidance. On woman was advised against buying the house she and her husband were considering getting. As it turned out, the house was faulty in so many ways. The technical examiner, who they employed, told them that it might take another million to just make the place habitable."

"And which gods have been coming through to you?"  
"Mostly Athena and Apollo," Elizabeth Lund replied. "But also Poseidon now and then. And Zeus once."  
"Zeus is the king of the gods, right? It must've felt very special to be visited by him?"  
"Yes it was, very exciting!"

Hannah shifted in the sofa. Those names, she got flashes of faces as she heard them. Apollo – tall and blond, with a self-assured smirk in a handsome face. Poseidon – light brown, long hair brushed back over chiseled features, eyes shifting in colours from green over gray and turquoise to the deepest of blues. Quite a bit more solemn and mature than the lighthearted Apollo. Athena...

_"We have sighted their ships. They are several times more than the last wave, the one we just hit back, and which cost us so much. This time I've no doubt that the Malaikin know of our strengths and of our weaknesses. They'll be so much harder to defeat now."_

That had been Athena!

_"Mother, do you think we can beat them this time?"  
"Dear child, we have to try at least, that's what we're here for after all," she took the tall and strong woman in an embrace, felt her arms encircle that athletic body she knew so well, inhaling her almondy scent. Her brave daughter despairing, that wasn't like her. It filled her belly with uncomfortable little jagged things. "If you don't believe we can beat them with mere force, then we have to deploy one of those clever plans of yours, don't you think so?"  
"You trust too much in me having a plan, what if I lack one this time?"  
"No, you don't, Athena. Just let it come to you. I know you can."_

"How was Zeus?" Maia Terrada wanted to know, leaning slightly forward in the sofa. She wore a too tight pink and white striped top and Hannah noted how her generous front zone was almost on its way of escaping the insufficient textile confinement. Embarrassing, did the viewers really need to see more of her milk chocolate skin?  
"He was remarkable," the interviewee replied. "Nothing like all those pictures of bearded old men. He was like, eh, he was youthful and handsome in a way, however old and wise in another way. Strong. Hard to explain, but I really got the feeling that if someone can save the world, then he's the one."

"Is it a religion now, to re-vive the old Hellenic faith?"  
"I wouldn't really call it a religion. To me those gods out there, they are for real. They are nothing for churches and priests and dusty old books. They are there for the general people. For the little people. Like you and me."  
"And why is that, Elisabeth?"  
"Because they come to us directly. They come to us in our dreams, and thus shortcutting all this need for holy men and interpreters! We don't need to go somewhere special on a special day to pray to them, we don't even have to pray to them. We can just talk, the way you and I here are talking. Ask questions."

"I'm certain a lot of people at home there in the sofas would want to understand how you know that this is real and not just fidgets of imagination."  
"One proof," Elizabeth Lund said, uncrossing her legs and also leaning forward in the sofa, as if to better reach both Maia Terrada and the viewers, "is that we have 3500+ followers in our Facebook group. 3500+ people of which most hadn't heard a word about this movement when they started to receive their dreams. Quite a few of them didn't even know the Greek gods, or at least very little of them. These people came to us because they recognized their own dreams in what we wrote. Came by the word of mouth. If we wouldn't have been there, they would still have been dreaming. And I believe there are many more out there dreaming, who haven't reached us yet. That so many people independently have these dreams must – at least in my eyes – be the proof that this is very real."

"Tell me one of your dreams, Elizabeth," Maia Terrada asked and the interviewee launched into a long and elaborated story about meeting Athena in a garden to some old castle. Meanwhile Hannah leaned back, closed her eyes and let the voice from the TV trigger other memories.

_"This is a great plan, Athena!" she said and gazed at the stunning woman from the corner of her eye, while they walked down a small path meandering through the beauty of the Soulful Garden. Athena moved with a feline grace, no edges to her body- or hand languages, it all flowed like water, elegant and animated. Her snow white tunic was beautifully tailored, leaving one shoulder bare and snug at her slim waistline, before it flouted out over her long, elegant legs, her sandaled feat taking nimble steps down the white-pebbled path. _

_To the left of them grew the ever blossoming cherry trees of Persephone and to their right the grassy ground sloped down to the canal, where the water was floating ever so slowly, reflecting the beauty around them. On the other side, beyond more cherry trees, stretched the sun-drenched, poppy-filled meadows all the way to the bluish hills in the distance. _

_"It's the best one I could come up with, however it doesn't feel failsafe," Athena admitted. "We're going to need a back-up strategy. A last resort if the Malaikin break through and threaten the mortal world. We have to stop them from even reaching the Portal."  
"Or we can close the portal," she heard herself say and Athena stopped dead in her tracks, turning to stare at her. For a while the only thing heard was the chirping of the birds and the faint rustle of wind through the trees._

_"That's impossible," Athena finally said, sighing and shaking her head, despair showing in those eyes which were so much alike her father's.  
"No, Athena. Not if we bring the Blue Crystal to the Other Side while the Red remains here. We could hide the blue one at Olympos Beneath. So if the Malaikin should against all odds find the Red, they cannot use it. Only Zeus can."  
"Only Zeus can... yes, that is true." Tilting her head, Athena seemed to think things over, before she suddenly straightened up, her whole being becoming more erect and focused. "Zeus," she called out. "Father! We need your advice! We believe you can save us!" _

"That's why he's referred to as Zeus Soter – Zeus the savior," Elizabeth Lund finished what she had been reiterating. Hannah realized she had lost the last four or five minutes of the interview, and now Maia Terrada let trough the commercials. Never mind, the whole interview would be able to repeat on the web within minutes, where Hannah could catch up with what she had missed.

Reaching out for the remote, she turned the TV off and then she stood and walked over to the window. Stockholm was still drenched in rain, this weather was running on repeat, like a jagged old LP record getting caught in a track. The water running down the window shattered the images and lights, turning the city into a surreal and endless canvas of lost sequins – or stars.

_So much more star lights than in real life. The shadow across his face was hard, rendering half of it in complete blackness, the way it did where there was no air. Still the remarkable beauty of his face was intact. A sad smile played around his lips, twisting them just a bit before disappearing again, as if it had never been there.  
"You have the blue one?" he asked.  
"I do," to underline her words she brought up the fist-sized gemstone, the stars catching its wondrous surface, sending rays of blue all over, speckling his beloved face like unusual tears, so utterly beautiful. So unusually sad.  
"Do you remember how to do it?" he asked of her. _

"Now I finally know your name," Hannah whispered as she rested first her shivering hands then her forehead upon the cold glass, feeling its chill almost invade her brain, shaking the resting goddess inside of her out of her quiescence. "Yes, I remember you, love. You are my Zeus!"


	3. Reminiscence

**Reminiscence**

_A/N Titanomachy – Greek for the 'Titan War' the Gods' battle against Cronos and his Titans. _

A sun, larger than its equivalent on Earth, shone brightly from deep blue sky specked with day stars but without a single cloud in sight. By the western horizon one of the moons was seen, a thin white crescent almost scratching the jagged mountain-range which was so blue and distant that it almost blended with the sky, discernable almost only by the sun-clad edges outlining it. The air over the rust coloured dessert was hot, dry and the winds brisk – loaded with energetic forces, emitted from the cosmos outside and channelized to the beings filling the air and the ground below. For those able to harvest such rarified power, this was in many ways better than regular sustenance. The heavenly Ambrosia, the ultimate nourishment kept their bodies forever young and granted them eternal cellular rejuvenation. Immortality.

Hera closed her eyes, drinking in the Ambrosia through her open chakras, feeling it empower her, readying her for the battle awaiting just moments away now. Around her she could hear the calls of the immortal fighters, the gods who had just learned that they too could face death under the new cosmic regimen.

Cronos – time – had changed the rules. He had stolen eternity from them and condemned them to a vulnerability they were not familiar with. The first who had fallen had never expected to do so, and had been taken by surprise. Cronos and his ilk had annihilated them easily. The ones coming after had been harder to defeat. However time was literally on the Titan's side. He could fight endlessly, while his enemies became trapped in a time-world where they were cornered, sometimes even excluded from the universal flow which granted them godhood. They found themselves playing a game where the rules changed constantly and the board today was unlike the one yesterday and would become different again tomorrow.

"And look how the mighty had fallen, one by one..." Hyperion's words echoed in the mind of Hera as she grasped Soulsinger, her mighty blade of Eonite. Eonite, the only material to defeat the Titans with, because it was the only matter which broke through their room-time protection, brought them out into the flowing reality again, and thus made them possible to kill. However no one really knew if the matter could kill Cronos himself, as no god had ever been able to even get near him. All who had tried had perished.

Now, the mighty battle horn of Kephalos was heard in the distance. Calling all to arms. The Titans had obviously been sighted by the horizon.  
"It's time," Leto asserted, standing next to Hera, the dry wind blowing strands of dark brown hair into her tanned, heart-shaped face, her gold-specked emerald eyes sparkling with the bizarre mix of apprehension and anticipation, her large double-axe held firmly in a two-hand grip. "However our chances could have been better. Our numbers might be the greatest, but against the Titans it has proven to mean so little."

"Don't despair, my friend," Hera replied, laying her hand on Leto's sinewy shoulder. "This is the only thing we can do. And if we go down here and now – or later – history will remember we tried at least."  
"Don't be so sure of that." A third voice joined them. Raven-haired Astraios, who came walking across the hot, red sand, joining them in the shadow of the ancient ruin, his blue tunic still stained with the blood from the last battle, his coal eyes burning. "Cronos may alter history too. Believe me; he has the power to do these things. And I don't doubt for a second that if he wins this, he'll rewrite history completely. Written us out of it. Miladies, if Cronos gets what he wants, we will never have existed."

"Can he do that?" Leto asked, doubtful eyes widening. "Re-write history."  
"He can. He has. And he will again. If we don't stop him," Hera said, her voice sharp and firm. Then she raised Soulsinger, let the sun bounce off the ice blue, oddly transparent matter. "So let us stop him! Then we will be the ones to write the history!"

As Hera launched herself in the air –_ this plinking plunking sound was heard _– and faced forwards, she saw what she feared were too many Titans coming in from the west, dotting the horizon – _the plinking plunking continued_ – now what, it wasn't supposed to be any – _pling plong jangling dangling doo_ – is Cronos doing this? Changing reality yet another time? Because she couldn't remember anything sounding like...

_Plinkeli plonkely dang dang doo..._

The annoying sound finally shattered the world around, her and... Hannah sat up in the sofa, cursing out loud, she had fallen asleep in front of the TV-set again. And that damn phone, where was it? She could hear it playing its too catchy melody. Yes, there it was, the dumb thing had fallen down on the floor and was now lying on the white carpet under the coffee table together with an orange pillow and yesterday's paper. Hannah reached out, only to hear the music stop.

**Missed Call**, read the taunting message on the screen, and she thumbed the message, pulling it to the side. That had been Linda. Probably about that weekend trip. Hannah groined, she felt as if she was very much changing her mind about this, a long weekend in the mountains didn't sound as promising as it had a fortnight ago at Linda and Erik's place. Linda and Erik owned a cottage in the Vemdalen ski resort and they had this idea of inviting up a whole bunch of friends there for the upcoming holiday.

Hannah was too tired, all this dreaming was like being awake 24/7. Never was there any rest. Still, she didn't want to be without this experience for all in the world. This reminiscence, these adventures of the divine Hera, it was the most amazing story she had ever been through. Better than any book, than any movie. Because she had lived it!

Or at least she thought she had.

No matter what, she kept writing it all down. If it should turn out to be nothing more than over-vivid imagination, Hannah was still having the story at her hard drive and backed-up at Dropbox. It could be an amazing book with a little work and a bit of beta-reading. And since she had her own publishing company, there was nothing stopping the book from hitting the stores.

"I'll call Linda on Wednesday," she said to her android phone. "Tell her I've come down with the flue. A white lie, then again I won't be the greatest company up there this time. Not with the life of Hera writing itself all over my mind. Now I have some story additions to do before I tuck in."

With those words, Hannah turned off the TV, which was showing football to someone who couldn't care less and walked out in the kitchen to fill up a large glass of ice water before going into her office and her waiting laptop.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤*

With a solemn expression upon his face, Zeus strode across the marble floor of the large, airy hall, until he reached the trio of gods gathered by the near end of the large conference table of shining, obsidian crystal. On the other side of the table, the sun shone in through high windows, and together with the glittering blue sea beneath, it was bathing the room in light. The curtains were blowing slightly in the wind from the sea and the iridescent mother-of-pearl textile was casting pale, alluring reflections around the walls and furnishing.

Procrastinating slightly, Zeus stopped by an urn and nipped a merry red begonia from its stalk, inhaling the sweet scent. Then he took the few steps needed until he was merely a few feet from the others.  
"You have bad news," his sister Hestia had red his face immediately.  
"Yes, I have," Zeus nodded his head in acknowledgment and the blonde goddess' shoulders slumped just the tiniest bit.  
"You couldn't open the portal?" Poseidon asked. "Or she wasn't there?"

"I could open the portal all right," Zeus said, letting his eyes wander from Hestia over to Poseidon and then stopping at green-eyed Demeter. The latter said nothing, though, waiting for him to speak.

"But something must have gone wrong when we closed the gate. Because the world on the other side, The Mortal Realm, it was – how should I say – it has changed."  
"What do you mean by changed?" Hestia pressed on, when Zeus stopped speaking. It was so unusual of him to not finish what he had to say and Hestia was beginning to fear that something was really wrong. Hera?

"It's... how should I say it? It's different. First I thought it wasn't the same place, that I had made some mistake and managed to open the Portal to some of the many other worlds we know exist out there. Those others which were cordoned off at the end of the Titanomachy, to spare them from the terrors of Cronos. But it is the same world. It is the world of the Humans all right."  
"But?" Poseidon asked, staring intensely at Zeus. He too was beginning to feel really uncomfortable.

Somewhere a bell told three strikes and Zeus' blue eyes darted towards the sound before he went on.  
"It's the Time Inaccuracy again. Some of this damage Cronos did to our Cosmos, and which we have yet not managed to repair. When I opened the gate to the Mortal World, more than 3000 years had passed since Hera and I sealed it. And Hera," Zeus choked upon his words and faced down, the begonia fell from his fingers and landed on the cold marble floor, like a drop of blood on white snow. "Hera is gone."

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤*

"Look at that man!" Astraios raised his hand and pointed up in the sky. "That can't be possible!"  
"And yet you just saw it," Nereus' deep bass resounded as the burly sea god kept his eyes on the appearance above. "That single man just defeated six Titans. With one strike of that mystery power. He undid their time shields and killed them." He shook his head in disbelief, his mane of dark dreads flowing about him.  
"Just like that," Astraios added, snapping his fingers for emphasis.

"Who is he really?" Hera wanted to know as she stared at what looked like a dream come true for the gods. A secret weapon materializing out of nowhere.  
"Only thing I know is that he calls himself Zeus," Nereus replied. "Leader of the Khaberis."  
"The Khaberis, huh," Leto huffed. "They came in late in the game."  
"Perhaps they couldn't help it," Astraios defended the strangers, "perhaps they were kept by Cronos' temporal games."  
"But if we cannot trust the time, what can we trust?" Leto asked.  
"Our weapon, and our minds," Hera replied, feeling some indistinct kind of hope flicker in her chest. A hope which she let colour her voice, eager to inspire the others. "Come, let's help that god! He shouldn't have to clean this place up all by himself."

As they whizzed trough the air to join Zeus and his followers, Hera heard Nereus' odd dismay behind her.  
"That man is too powerful," he god huffed. "One single man with so much potency, it can never end well!"

She had wanted to question him at that moment, but there was no time for that, they were closing in on the enemies fast, it was only a matter of moments before the Titans would shift their attention and see what was coming for them.

But they didn't. They were too preoccupied with their new enemy, the god who was cutting through them like grass, using something which at times looked like a blade, at times like a whip and at other times appeared to be nothing but pure energy. Hera had to force herself to take her eyes off that striking, tall man with his shining fair hair and swift, almost liquid body language. It was as if nothing of what the enemies threw at him could sting him, instead he danced his way through them with scaring ease.

Meanwhile Hera and her siblings in arms grasped the element of surprise and launched themselves right into the melee of Titans, who were now starting to retreat – to flee even. This powerful stranger didn't bother with runaways though, he left them for Hera's force to cut down. Instead he appeared to have set his objective elsewhere. That enormous silvery orb which had just materialized out by the sea-shore and was now hovering menacingly there. The war headquarters of Cronos.

Was Zeus really going up against the Titan King? And with such a determination? This was something Hera really wanted to see. No matter how it ended, if someone could shake Cronos, this new mystery and powerful player on the stage was the one.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤*

"Get well soon, Hannah," Linda said over the phone. "There'll be more skiing weekends, count on that! Perhaps we can go up during Easter, if there's still any snow."  
"Yes, that would be nice," Hanna replied non-committedly. Easter was way into the future. Hopefully these dreams would have ended by then. One way or the other. Besides, she had never been the biggest fan of skiing, what had tempted her with that weekend had been a chance to hang with her friends. Not only Linda and Eric but also Karl, Natek, Chantale and Renate had told they were in. Since Renate was no any avid skier either, Hannah had counted on being able to sneak away with her to do some outlet-shopping and spa-afternoons.

However what she really wanted to do, Hannah thought as she hung up and put the phone down on the kitchen counter, was trying to find Zeus. Her lost starman. Now she knew his name, his looks. He had to be somewhere out there, hopefully looking for her too. She couldn't pretend her heart didn't ache for that man. He was no substitute for the family she had lost, he was far more than that. He was his own enigmatic abscense, and Hannah hoped profoundly that she would find a way through to him. No matter where he hid.

Opening the fridge, she pulled out the frozen vegetable mix she had left there to thaw, poured some oil in a frying pan and turned on the gas. She poured the vegetables in the pan and stirred them around, using a large wooden fork, before she added fresh scrimps, some blue cheese and then more oil. Taking the remote, she turned up the music a bit more, sang along to Loreen's Euphoria while finishing her dinner. Then she poured it all down on a plate before fetching a bottle of chilled water from the fridge and cutting up a slice of bread. After that she was finally sitting down to eat. Only to stop with her fork halfway into the food, as a strange sensation came over her. It was as if...

Putting down the utensil on the matte blue china plate, she raised her head slowly, opening her mouth as if to say something.

But the place in front of her was empty. There was no dish there, no glass of water, no nothing. Especially not anyone sitting in that chair. Which was impossible anyway since it was occupied by all those old papers and magazines she ought to take out to the recycler bin.

But for a short moment, not longer than a heartbeat, had she got the distinct impression of a presence. Like someone had been there. Someone with the wish to be with her, to share her meal.

"Zeus," she said out loud, but naturally there was no response whatsoever.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

"Zeus!" Metis called in exaltation, raising her blade in the air, sun bouncing off the metal. "It's him! Zeus!"  
"You know him?" Hera asked as she stopped in the air in front of the striking, dark-skinned woman, whos vibrant and clear-ringing contralto carried forcefully over the landscape. Metis was an authoritative and powerful old goddess who had been around longer than any of them cared to remember and she was one who Hera held in deep respect.  
"We've met," Metis said non-committedly, and Hera wondered about the peculiar emotions fluttering across the older goddess' face as she spoke.  
"Is he really thinking he can break through that orb?" Leto was asking as she approached the other two.  
"Just watch it," Metis replied with a smirk.

Compliantly, both Hera and Leto turned to look at the horde of newly arrivals. A multitude of gods and goddesses who were now gathering around the Orb of Cronos. The Khaberis. They were circling the gleaming structure, spiraling around it as if they were a rope out to suffocate the thing there. And at its lead – Zeus. Zeus, whose name all those new deities kept chanting out in a hypnotic rhythm. Zeus, who lifted what appeared to be a luminescent, yellow spear surrounded by dancing blue flashes of static. At the same time he called out something in a language none of them could understand – and then he forcefully brought the spear-like contraption down, hitting the top of the orb. Where it stroke a large fissure appeared. A crack, which was soon multiplying, crackling up the structure into smaller and smaller pieces like a breaking egg shell – until those shards with a rustling sound, like a heavy torrent of rain, came crashing down towards the ground below.

When all those glass-like pieces fell, they were sending off sharp reflections, almost blinding the onlookers before they appeared to cut into the ground with a force as if they had weighted far more than they could possibly do. Cut down into it and open chasms to in the ground. Chasms, from which hot, deep orange lava came fountaining up in the air with booming and hissing sounds, before it met the sea-water streaming in to replace the suddenly vanished sand. Vapors and mist swiveled upwards, almost hiding the shore-side landscape before the evaporating lava cooled down and stiffed into strange formations. This all happened within moments. As Hera took her eyes off the ground, she found the large structure in front of her being engulfed in fire. Fire frozen stiff – or that was what it seemed at first sight.

But the hot and bright yellow things engulfing Cronos' structure was not frozen fire, it was distorted time. These frightful-looking anomalies were the result of Cronos constant manipulations with the temporal flux. Time was being turned inside-out and back to front and slowly beginning to tear reality apart.

"If this doesn't stop," Hera heard Metis' voice somewhere to her left, "this whole universe is going to be ripped apart and we're all doomed. Even Cronos himself, however he refuses to see it. Our only hope now is Zeus."


	4. Iridescence

** Iridescence**

If Cronos' headquarters of deformed room-time had been horrid to behold, it still held nothing against the Titan Master himself. This embodiment of ravaging fury, which now came bolting out from his destroyed nest, was the most dreadful thing Hera had ever seen, her thoughts being confirmed by Leto and Nereus drawing breaths behind her and even the normally so held-together Metis muttering a profanity at the sight. Doubtlessly, it was Cronos, the abysmal enigma finally arriving out in the open!

No, Cronos wasn't ugly. Just strange. Strange in a frightful and outlandish way, radiating malice. Just as his dome had been, he was all silvery, as if covered in mercury from top to toe, reflecting the world around him in blues of the ocean and the sky and the rust red hues of the rolling dessert dunes. His head was bald and featureless, save for a sole, horizontally running slit where the eyes should be. A slit shining with bright blue energy. His body was that of a burly humanoid, however larger than anyone around, arms and legs long and ropy, the chest wide and conical, shrinking down to a slim waist where the legs met. But no sign of reproductive organs. The onlookers were soon to learn why those were not needed.

As the Titan threateningly raised his arms in the air, his hands seemed to explode and the fingers turned into sleek silver missiles firing off in the direction of Zeus and his Khaberis fighters. When those severed fingers dashed through the air, they grew and transformed, turned into beings, into new Titans, perfect, glistening mercury copies of Cronos. Meanwhile the hands of the Time Lord had reshaped themselves, only to be deployed in the same way again, ten fingers turning into ten new Cronos clones cutting their way through the air. Three times the Titan leader repeated his actions, and thus 30 figures were soon taking on Zeus and the ones nearest him, including a tall, burly man wielding a huge trident and a vibrant, lithe woman with wild blonde curls who was launching fire-balls at the attackers.

Meanwhile Zeus kept on deploying that strange force of his, a force which was cutting the new clones in half and in even smaller pieces. Some clones managed to mend themselves; others were destroyed and crashed down on the ground, several of them ending up paled upon the sharp edges of the newly formed lava structures down on the beach.

Horrified, Hera watched as the fire goddess got overpowered by about five or six of these silvery Titans. That was something she refused to be the witness off, so she launched herself into battle without a single after-thought. Using her Soulsinger, she was soon slashing trough quite a number of enemies. The next moment, she had liberated the fire goddess. The striking, blond woman flashed off a toothy grin at Hera.  
"Thanks, whoever you are!" she breathed.  
"I'm Hera," she told as she churned her blade into another attacking Titan, a more regular one this time.  
"I'm Hestia," the fire goddess replied, her soprano slightly husky.

They both turned to find not only the Khaberis, headed by the long haired trident carrier, attacking the clones. Hera's comrades had also hurled themselves into the battle. Zeus however had propelled himself around the clones in an agile and swift maneuver and was now heading for the original Titan.

With a growl at this new enemy who was surprising him, the Time Lord rose his right hand, no doubt to clone a new set of little cronides, however Zeus was too quick, and with his strange energy, now looking like a curved blade, he cut off the Titan's arm. The next second the agile Khaberis somersaulted backwards, avoiding a purple bolt of time-energy being fired against him.

"That was what he trapped us with," Hestia breathed in Hera's ear as she set a Titan on fire. "Me, Poseidon, Demeter and Hades. However Hades got us out. A crazy plan. Actually, he killed us."  
"Huh?" Hera's doubt was heard while she swung the Soulsinger in a figure eight and getting rid of another two stygian figures coming for them.  
"Sounds strange, I know it. I'll tell you later. When Zeus's done with the asshole."

Strange, Hera thought. Everything was strange in this place. So when a very much alive goddess of fire claimed that someone had killed her and a few others, it didn't puzzle Hera that much. Besides, she didn't have the time for confusion, there were Titans to fight everywhere now. Or at least until Hestia called out something and pointed downwards. Hearing that, the god with the trident fired off a ray of energy from his weapon. As it hit its target, the ground shook like mad, tumbling the lot of the newly created lava structures, crushing whatever being – friend or foe – that got in the way.

A chasm erupted in the earth below and a monstrous eruption of black liquid sprouted from chasm and gushed into the air, fountaining high with a thunderous sound. A liquid Hera recognized upon its notorious reek. Oil. Oil, which was drenching all and everything in the vicinity.  
"Protect yourself, deities!" Hestia called out and the next thing she set fire on the inflammable liquid, turning the lot around them into a burning inferno. Engulfed in flames, the Titans attackers went down. However Hera and her little group had discerned Hestia's and the other Khaberis' plan and managed to coat themselves in protective forces.  
"Potent, firebrand!" Metis called out, appreciation filling her voice.

Within minutes the area around them became totally cleaned of foes. Save Cronos, whom Zeus was still battling some two hundred meters away, both of them looking like they had neither been injured nor managed to inflict some harm to the other one. Cronos had restored his lost hand; however he had given up firing off clones from his fingers now.

"Are they – equal in power?" Astraios was asking as he flew up next to Hera and Hestia. He looked – and smelled dreadful, drenched as he was in a horrible mixture of oil, Titan blood and other fluids. Thus Hera understood that she came off very much the same, however she couldn't care less at the moment.

"At least Cronos seems to have met his match," Nereus said as they all watched Zeus lash out again with his power, yet hardly scratching his adversary, who was only sending these energies to some other point in time.  
"But he doesn't appear to be harmed by what Zeus is throwing at him," Leto pointed out, anxiety painting her voice.  
"Wait for it," the man with the trident said, sounding oddly assured. Then he craned his neck to meet the eyes of Hera and her siblings in arms. "I'm Poseidon by the way," he added. "And I'm fully convinced that Zeus has a plan."  
"Hope you're right then, Poseidon Earthquaker," Nereus replied drily.

Poseidon, Hera thought. There was an exotic ring to that name, which together with the strange weapon of his hinted that this man came from further away than most people around.

The next moment she forgot everything about it, as some strange, glittering field was quickly beginning to form around Cronos. A force field which seemed to glow brighter and brighter with every heartbeat. Meanwhile Zeus was backing off, as if he was aiming to keep some safe distance between himself and that iridescence.

And then...

Then the iridescence started to undulate around Cronos, oscillating faster and faster – until it suddenly turned into a bright blinding nova, before it imploded in an ear-popping bang, created by the surrounding air rushing in to cover the abruptly manifested vacuum. Then Cronos was gone...

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

Startled and with a sense of dislocation, Hannah woke up. This was the longest dream sequence she had been through so far. She remembered it with such a piercing clarity that she was now perfectly convinced that she had actually lived this. That she really had been the goddess Hera on the battlefield. Sitting up in bed, she pulled the duvet around herself, and tucked the feet under her before she checked the clock. The glowing, red numbers told that it was still some ten minutes before her wake-up music was about to start, but she decided against lingering. Instead she swung her legs over the edge of the bed and made a face as her feet hit the cold floor. Letting go of the duvet, she flung herself across the chilly room, the hallway and into the bathroom, where she turned on a shower so sizzling she could barely stand it.

Closing her eyes, she turned her face to the shower head, feeling the warm water splash over her form, almost expecting the dream to be flushed away with the water and disappear down the effluent the way dreams usually go. But no, the final battle and the fall of Cronos stayed firmly in her mind. Thus she knew what she had to do. There was no use postponing the inevitable anymore.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

Standing on top of a skyscraper, Zeus was looking out over a glittering city which was so different from everything he remembered of this world before the closure of the Portal. In a way this waste metropolitan area reminded him of Derasone, the now lost place from which he had originated. The neon played over his features as he looked down in the evenly cut chasm between the stark architecture of the concrete- and glass pylons. There, some 300 meters below, he saw the neatly ordered advance of the many automatic vehicles with which the mortals transported themselves these days. Impressive, however they were running on fossil fuels which were slowly poisoning the air around them. Zeus felt that the composition of the air was a far cry from what it once had been on Earth.

Lifting his face, he gazed over the sparkling skyline, and towards the dark sea beyond the urban landscape. A sea and a harbour where huge ships moved about. To his left, on its hill stood what had once been Athena's magnificent temple – the Parthenon. It was destroyed, only a shell of dirty marble remained, like the ribcage of some dead animal. For some peculiar reason the derelict structure was bathed in light. He wondered about that for some moments, then he shrugged it off. There was no possible way neither Athena nor he would be remembered. After 3000 years, it was more than obvious that this world had moved on and left all ideas of divine guardians behind them.

From what Zeus understood of the brief thoughts he tuned in on, these people nurtured an 'every one for themselves'-attitude and they were preoccupied with all kinds of mundane things. Of the gods and their divine teaching and philosophies remained next to nothing.

Meanwhile, this world was in great peril. It was slowly heating up, due to all the emission of carbon oxide. The seas were dying and so were most of the forests. Everything here reeked of impending disaster. Still, the minds of the people he had tuned into didn't seem to be aware of it. Or perhaps they didn't care. They were too busy making their money and then spending it.

Zeus shivered out of discomfort, in a way he blamed himself for this tragedy. If only he and Hera had been more thorough when they closed the Portal, then he would have been able to open it again, not 3000 years but 45 days later, after their defeat of the Malaikin. Then the world would still be as he had left it. With his Hera waiting somewhere around, with the blue crystal in her hand.

However, there had been no Hera and no crystal. Just this so outright dissimilar world.

"Father?" Zeus turned around at the voice, spotting Hermes landing next to him. The auburn-haired god shone of barely concealed exaltation, his blue eyes glittering. "Amazing, isn't it?"  
"You mean – this?" Zeus raised a brow as he lashed out with his hand over the cityscape.  
"Of course! It's so volatile, so exciting. So full of things to see and to do. The epitome of a market economy! The liberation of trade, the deliverance of creativity, the freedom of choice..."  
"Hermes!" Zeus held up a hand and stopped his son, whose mouth shut abruptly. "That's all very well, a fine description of the pros of this world. But there are cons as well. Problems we ought to take care of, since this is our world as well as theirs. Our creation, our responsibility!"

"Dad!" Hermes protested. "Don't be so serious all the time!"  
"Besides, we are here to look for Hera, remember!"  
"Yes," with slumped shoulders, Hermes nodded his head. "However, I don't know where to begin. With seven billion people in this world!"  
"Seven billions, you're kidding me!" another voice was heard, a female this time. Then Artemis joined the men at the rooftop. She had wound up her raven hair in a knot on top of the head and her crimson and black leather outfit was perhaps a bit too revealing for this world, however Zeus didn't bother telling her that yet, since it wasn't certain they would be needing to show themselves to any mortals. Besides, both he and Hermes wore their traditional outfits of short tunics and sandals, which wouldn't blend very well either.

"I'm not kidding," Hermes answered. "There are actually seven billion dwelling on this rock."  
"Surprises me," his half-sister said. "Then again, if there are more cities like this, I guess it might be possible. This used to be Athens, right? I wonder what our sister'd say if she saw it now," Artemis went on, gazing out over the jagged skyline. "Look at all of those huge flashing signs they have covered the walls with. Confusing stuff, whoever can find something aesthetic in such designs?"

"They're not supposed to be aesthetic, they're supposed to sell stuff. And it's still called Athens," Hermes confirmed, apparently he had done quite a bit of research down there.  
"It does now?" Zeus exclaimed. "After 3000 years. With a race which isn't really known for continuity and where everything else besides the coastlines has changed beyond recognition. But that riddle will have to wait. The two of you are my best trackers. You'll work with Iris, Hesperos and Zephyros to try to find the Queen. It won't be easy, I know it, but if anyone can do it then you are the ones."

"Trust me, dad, we will find her," Artemis said in a self-assured voice, "if we so should turn every one of these cities upside down and shake it!"  
"I wouldn't recommend that course of action," Zeus chuckled drily.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

As soon as it was clear that Cronos was gone to not be coming back, the party started. While the sun set in the west over what was once a battlefield, and more and more stars emitted across the darkening sky, people – gods as well as mortals - were gathering around huge bonfires, ate and drank, sang and danced. Already they were starting to spin the tale of Zeus' defeat of the Titan Time Lord. Even now that story showed the inevitable signs of being blown out of proportions, and Hera knew it would echo through ages and across light-years.

Together with Leto and Astraios, she was making her way through the swaying and heaving hordes of celebrating people. She really wanted to find Hestia again, since she wished to know more about where this fire goddess and her powerful and enigmatic friends were coming from. It seemed like a mystery to Hera that a group of complete strangers could show up seemingly out of nowhere, hurl themselves into this war, which has been going on for so long, and then send just one single man to defeat Cronos. This Zeus, who was he? Was he really the liberator the reveling people around were holding him for – or was he another threat? A new danger manifesting itself out of nowhere?

Nereus' words echoed in her mind – 'That man is too powerful. One single man with so much potency, it can never end well! So much strength of body will suffocate the mind and taint the sense of reason, bring out the worst in a man.'

She had shrugged it off by then, but seeing the way Zeus defeated his adversary, that huge orb of iridescence, which had imploded upon Cronos, the old sea god's words had come back to her. None of all the people she had asked had any idea of what that iridescent orb could have been, what powers really had been at play there today. Therefore it worried Hera. This world was her responsibility – or should have been – had not Cronos changed all that. And she was fully intent on taking it back. But first she had to find out if Zeus could be an even bigger threat than the Titan had been, if they weren't jumping out of the frying pan into the fire by welcoming him.

The one she believed could answer this, was Hestia. She and Hera had got quite a good report earlier. If Hera would ask the right questions, she held no doubt that she would receive the correct answers.

But first she had to find the blond fire goddess, which perhaps wasn't the easiest thing to do, given the enormous crowds gathering on shore side plains now. Striding purposefully through the throngs of people, she was heading for a bonfire burning with a strange blue light. It was as if its emittance was the complete opposite of the normal, yellow fires of her world. Therefore she held no doubt that this was where the Khaberis gathered. Seeking with all her senses, Hera thought she felt the essence of that sea-god with earth-shaking abilities – Poseidon. However she had met him for such a brief time that she wasn't sure it really was him. Nonetheless, if it was – then Hestia would not be far away, so Hera set her course towards the place where she felt the aura she thought belonged to the Khaberis sea god.

But as it turned out – it wasn't Poseidon she found. It was Zeus.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

If she was to find Zeus it would do no good staying here in Stockholm. No, Hannah would have to follow her heart to Greece and to Mount Olympos and do whatever was in her might to locate that blue crystal again. Because it was her key to the Other Side – and the man she loved.

Luckily for her those late winter days were quite calm workwise. She could as well take her translation work with her and the few upcoming meetings were possible to postpone. Claiming family reasons – that wasn't a lie after all, was it?

Thus she spent the midmorning with browsing through travel agencies on the net, trying to find the most convenient way to go to Mount Olympos. However most of the agencies selling trips to Greece were just offering charter tours, and there were no charter tours to Mount Olympos, most of them seemed to go to one island or another. Not to mention that they began first in late April or early May. In the end Hannah settled for a Ryan Air flight to some insignificant Athens suburb, where she would rent a car and then drive to Olympos. That would mean a terribly early rise, on the other hand she ought to be able to nap a bit both on the bus transfer and on the flight itself.

Next Friday the trip was due, and suddenly Hannah could hardly contain herself. She was finally going to do something, an attempt to take one small step in a positive direction. One step closer to her Zeus, who was waiting for her on the other side of the portal. She was sure he was, she could feel in her heart - in her whole being how he wished for her to be back with him.


	5. Incandescence

**Incandescence**

"Looking for something, Milady?" Zeus asked in melodic voice as their eyes met. "Or mayhap someone?" The next moment he stood gracefully from his place and took the few steps over to her, the dark cloak he was wearing was shifting strangely between purple and blue as he moved, the white tunic beneath oddly bright in the firelight. Still these things weren't what mainly caught Hera's attention.

It was the pair of most amazing, captivating eyes she had ever beheld, blue like incandescent sapphires regarding her enquiringly. Intelligent, analytical and wise they were, the kind of eyes that have seen the whole world with all its beauty and horror, processed it and gathered it within this man to mold his self with.

His strikingly chiseled face was framed by unruly platinum blond curls that fell down over broad shoulders and an impressive chest. To say he took her breath away was an understatement, lost for words, Hera stopped in her tracks. Around her the nocturnal world faded. Her comrades, the people gathered by the bonfire, the talks and the music, the smell of food and the pale, silvery moon light – everything became of less importance.  
"Well?" Zeus tilted his head, smiling politely as curiosity manifested itself in his features. Curiosity and some other kind of awareness as well. She had affected him too, Hera understood. Strengthened by his benign interest she decided to grasp the nettle and go for it.

"I was looking for you, Sir," she answered, truthfully now, as she placed her hands on her hips, wetting her lips ever so slightly. With a corner of her mind she noted that Zeus had caused some kind of impact on Leto as well, however Astraios was silently waiting his turn, reluctantly resting in his inquisitiveness. "Zeus is it, right?"  
"Yes, that is my name," the tall and handsome man replied. "Zeus, of the house of Olympos of Derasone, however I doubt any of those names say anything to you. Not anymore. And you should be?"

"Hera," she replied. "Hera of – well, this place. Aragirian. Those with me are Astraios and Leto." Zeus and her comrades exchanged polite acknowledgements before Hera went on. "I imagine you're a bit over all this now, people coming to press your hands and thanking you for getting rid of the bastard Cronos. So I'm going to pass on that and get right down to business. Why did you defeat Cronos?"  
"Because I could," Zeus' voice was resounding deeply and solemnly. As he took just the slightest step closer to her, Hera became aware of his body heat and his fragrances. There was the food and wine he had digested, but beneath them a masculine, challenging scent and a faint trace of burnt magic, the distinct singed, ginger smell.

Hera felt her throat run dry, and something liquid and cold falling down in her belly, never had anyone affected her like this man, not to mention after such a short moment.  
"Yes, we all saw that. It was impressive with that iridescent what-now-it-was."  
"Condensed energy."  
"Say what?" his mere presence was distracting her, she found that he had captivated her eyes with his blue orbs, the odd magenta sheen from the flames casting undulating shadows across his handsome face. 'Get a grip, Hera', she scolded herself, fighting an undercurrent of emotions which definitely had no place here and now.

"Condensed energy," Zeus repeated himself. "Or to be more precise, all the energy I fired off at Cronos augmented and enriched, concentrated into one single point in time like sunshine focused through a lens. It became too much even for him."  
"And you knew that?" she had to ask.

"Milady Hera, Cronos' main strength was his ability to manipulate time. Something he kept on doing until we were all risking to lose this war, simply because we forgot why we fought it. We even disremembered who we were. This power over time was his main weapon, a powerful weapon. He used it constantly – which paradoxically made him predictable. So I decided to turn his own armament against him. Every ray of energy I launched at him was programmed with a single aim – to overrun Cronos' time manipulative force and manifest itself into the time span I chose. That being about half an hour from when I started to attack him."

"So when Cronos sent away everything you fired at him – it ended up in that place?" Hera asked. "I mean, in that time?"  
"Yes it all became re-manifested half an hour after the start of our fight. Half an hour of launched off energy, that's quite a bit, wouldn't you say so, Lady Hera?"  
"Yes," she could barely nod her head in agreement. She was impressed, there was no denying that. "Smart move, Zeus."

"Thank you, Hera," he bowed slightly, and she spotted a gleaning charm on a golden necklace which escaped his jewel-necked tunic as he righted himself up again. That charm, there was something familiar with it, but she couldn't remember where she had earlier seen that symbol.  
"You're welcome, naturally I'm impressed. I'm sure you've heard that said before. Now I actually wish to know your next step. By defeating Cronos, you have very much conquered this whole realm, which for so long has been under his boot. Obviously we wish to know what you have planned further on. What kind of conqueror are you, Zeus of Olympos?"

Hera hadn't thought of what response to expect from Zeus. Actually she had thought very little ahead, to not lock herself into prejudices. However she had never expected the comeback she now got. Zeus was essentially laughing at her comment.  
"I've come to take back what's mine."  
"And that should be?" she faced him in confusion and he smiled even wider.  
"My home."  
"Where is that?" spontaneously she craned her neck, looking in some random direction, as if she was expecting to behold a glittering city suddenly revealing itself like fata morgana on the horizon. But Zeus caught her attention again.

"It's right here," he replied. The next moment, just like the arrival of a summer thunderstorm, his mood changed from gleeful to sad, almost angered. "Or should have been. Or make that was. The city-state of Derasone was located right here right now. Right here twelve millions of people lived – before Cronos went back in time and destroyed it. Destroyed it and with it my family, my friends, all I held dear. My very purpose in life. All gone, save for my darling sister, Hestia, who got away, because she and I were in another place and time when the disaster struck."  
"He killed your parents?" Suddenly Hera understood Zeus' motif all too well. Revenge. That harsh and lethal emotion, that toxic flame which had ended so many lives, including quite often the avengers' very own.

"Not exactly," Zeus sighed and took his eyes from her for the first time since they had met, lost himself in painful remembrance. "He prevented them from being born. By preventing their parents and grandparents and so many generations back in time from happening. The whole amazing kingdom of Derasone – my birthright. Gone like this!" With furrowed brows he snapped his fingers to underline his words. And suddenly the strangest emotion came over Hera. She wanted to reach out and hold him. To comfort him. Him – the most powerful and formidable man she had ever encountered, and on top of that - a complete stranger!

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

"May I help you, stranger," the bent, elderly man said in an English, which sounded like he had learned it by watching Kung Fu movies.  
"I want a room for a few nights," Hannah replied as she righted up her roller suitcase on the gray marble floor, looking around a lobby which was anonymously stylish in gray, white and rust-red. "Nothing fancy, it just has to be clean and reasonably heated."  
"Well you're lucky, we got one single room left. All the rest are occupied. That's 26 Euros a night. Including the breakfast buffet."

Surprised, Hannah raised a brow at that, but she said nothing. She had expected this month too off-season and that she would probably be the only guest, perhaps bar one in the small hotel. She didn't comment it though; she just agreed and produced her credit card.  
"Then I wonder if it's possible to hike the Mount Olympos," she continued.  
"Another one?" the old man shook his head slightly. "Now, you don't look like the rest, don't have that crazed look, but who am I to tell? Whatever happened to our good Lord and gentle Maria?!"

The hotel owner returned her credit card, before he bent down with a protesting Greek word as his back obviously hurt. Returning up in standing position again, he handed a map over to her.  
"See, Spiros made those. My nephew that is, he always seems to know how to make the money out of anything. Clone that lad some hundred times and there would be no crisis in this land, I tell you! This'll be 2 Euros for the map but since you're staying here, it's a discount on fifty cent. All the trekking paths are dotted out on this one, and they are also marked out when you get there. You can see where they start at least."

"You seem very well prepared," Hannah pointed out as she paid for the map as well.  
"Yes, it's not every day this backwater gets a tourist boom, so we decided to make hay while the sun shines."  
"All those people – why do they come here?"  
"Why, looking for the gods of course. Crazy people from all over the world. Even the Chinese mind you! They come here to climb the Olympos, looking for ole Zeus and his gang. Don't know what has gotten into people. I've never seen anything like it. For so long nobody asked for these characters, save for the odd classic student, and they were content with dusty books mind you. And then BAM – some five months ago. People started coming here in busloads, looking for them old gods. Came with caravans and tents and whatever and rented all the rooms available in the vicinity. I'm Kostas by the way," he held out a weathered and freckled hand, and Hannah took it, noticed the unexpected steeliness of the grip.

"Around Christmas it was worst. However these nutcases called it Solstice, lit up a huge bonfire, they actually expected Zeus to show himself. The old priest, father Jeremiah, he almost had a heart attack. And they partied and drank and made all kind of noise. Perhaps it was really Dionysos they were waiting for, what do I know?"

Hannah chuckled; she had recently learned who Dionysos was.  
"But nothing happened," Kostas went on. "No Zeus no Dionysos, no nobody. Whereupon the lot of them went home. But recently they have started to seep back. Not flooding like earlier, but I should guess there are some 200 here around, looking for the gods. Now, before I insult you, are you one of them as well?"  
"Not exactly," Hannah breathed in. "I'm here to look for some family members."

It was true after all...

"Oh, I understand," Kostas nodded his head with a grin. "Then I can assure you there has been no accidents here, so your beloved one should be safe, even though a bit obsessed with this Olympos thing. For some reason these people seem to have something – protecting them. If that really should be those old gods, now that's more than I can tell, but I bet you'll soon find yours. Perhaps I can even help you; perhaps they are even staying here. Where are you from?"  
"Sweden."  
"Unfortunately no Swedes here at this hotel. There's the Greek bunch of course, Athenians mostly. Then a few Germans and French, a Russian couple, a Chinese ditto, two American journalists and a sole Estonian man about my own age. Professor in literature, those who might hold an academic interest in the gods, however for him it appears to be religion as well."

Kostas had orated bit more before finally relieving Hannah to take her map and her luggage and pull it out across a cobblestoned backyard with some rickety blue garden furniture, a dry fountain and two old olive trees. Her room was on the other side, no 23. It was small, worn and Spartan – but immaculately clean. The white walls appeared to have been newly painted and the red curtains and bed cover looked new as well. The room even had Wi-Fi according to a sign on the wall next to one asking her to not throw paper in the toilet. However right now, Hannah was neither interested in the Internet nor in the hygiene facilities, all she wanted to do was taking a rest after her lengthy trip. Kicking off her shoes, she fell down on the bed, which creaked alarmingly beneath her. Uh-oh, better be careful with that, earlier guests seemed to not have.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

"The thing is," Zeus said and swirled the wine in his cup, "I was married to Metis. However she cannot even remember that."  
"What did she say when you told her?" Hera asked as she held on to his strong hand. It was all so strange. They had sat like this for hours while the merriments had died around them as people had sought solitude to find sleep. She had started with questioning the honesty in his motives, and ended up having the conversation of her life. With this powerful, handsome, awe-inspiring – and so incredibly lonely man.  
"She just told me to forget it. In this new time-world she is married to a man named Tritonis. The predicted daughter we should have had – she's not going to happen."

By those words, Zeus rubbed the amulet again and seeing the question in her eyes she let go and showed it to her.  
"My family crest. Aegis of Olympos. If you ever were in Derasone, you would probably have seen it. We used to be quite influential. Now I have no Athena to give it to."  
"Athena?" Questioning she took the amulet, regarding the crossed thunderbolts. They were familiar; she could have sworn she'd seen this before.  
"That was the name I had wanted to give to our daughter. If not everything had changed before it became possible."  
"So he took your child as well, Zeus? Before she was even born?"

"Before she was even conceived. Gives you a headache, doesn't it?" Zeus rubbed his forehead with one large hand. "Now, I shouldn't be surprised, Cronos has done this to so many of us. Twisting our minds and our memories, eradicating the past so many times it's a wonder we haven't all gone crazy, when the things we believe we remember have never been. Now look at us," he let go of her hand to indicate the silent world around them, where just embers remained of the earlier so merry bonfires, "all lost and forlorn. It'll take ages to rebuild what we had. The question even is what we should rebuild. Your memories are clearly not mine, Hera. And I cannot take back the city I lost, the people who died. My mother, Rhea the brave. One of the Three Goddesses of Derasone. She never existed. I have become a man without parents. Not orphan but deprived of origin. An anomaly who perhaps should not be alive."

"Yes, you should!" Hera reached out to take his hand again, feeling salty tears sting her eyes, sticking for a moment to her lashes and distorting her sight before rivuleting down her cheeks. "Yes, you should, Zeus. Or we would never be here and now you and I. And I believe... Athena..."

"No, please, don't cry, Hera. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have lamented like this. I shouldn't have given you my fathomless despair. You didn't need to hear..."  
"Zeus!" she put her hand to his lips. "It's all right. Or better yet – it's going to be. No one is going to tamper with time anymore, and we'll all get the chance to heal. Then Athena will come to be. One way or another. I know that, dear!"

Hearing her, he inhaled deeply and took her other hand holding them hard.  
"But I've lost Metis. In this time-world I've never even had her. I cannot ask her to return to me because according to her we have never been together."

"Don't despair, Zeus! The sun will rise soon," she nodded her head towards the eastern horizon, where the sky was slightly brighter and where the largest of the three moons was rapidly making its way towards its highest point in the sky. "A new day will begin. Now, all those people around here will be needing someone to guide them, to take control, to make things happen, since there's no real enemy to fight, save for some lost, leaderless Titans. I can only speak for the group I lead, they will follow me. Your people, Zeus, they will ask for you to be strong. Just like the incandescence on the horizon, a new day is breaking. And you will have to be the sun."

For the first time in hours she actually saw a smile play upon his full lips.  
"I've never been much of a sun god," he answered her. "But if we can do this together you and I, Hera, then I'm certain we can perform miracles."  
"That sounds great! People are starving for miracles these days."

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤*

There they were, all those people starving for miracles. Dreaming of Greek gods. Kostas was right; it was a jamboree of caravans and tents, however strangely disciplined. Hannah remembered the Facebook site, she had probably chatted with a quite few of those gathering here. Crazy people, had been her first thought, but then she had scolded herself. Look who's talking! She, who was so convinced she was the goddess Hera that she had come all this way from Sweden to look for a dream beloved and a blue crystal. She if any should be in a straightjacket.

Instead she was right here by the foothills of Olympos in Greece, striding past all those gathered people without stopping, dressed in a wind jacket and with hiking boots on, water bottle and energy bars in a backpack together with cellphone, GPS, a first aid kit and some other more or less necessary stuff. A few people called out to her as she passed them by, telling her this and that about the Greek Gods, wanted to sell her stuff or just having her stopping for a chat. But she just smiled at them and waved, pretending to not understand.

Soon she had left the motley gathering behind her and was ascending a dirt road where she even met cars, some of them honking their horns, but she didn't bother with them either. She just kept on walking, enjoying the early spring landscape, filling her lungs with fresh, forest-smelling air, rich with oxygen. Yesterday's drizzle had been replaced by sunshine from a clear blue sky, almost warming her back. For some reason the skydome appeared to be even larger, higher up than it should be, and with a deeper shade of blue.

Olympos lay ahead of her like a challenge of beauty and mystery. Blue-gray, snow-clad and cone-shaped, like a Fuji without crater opening, immaculate white hills of snow contrasting to the blue sky beyond. The mists which had shrouded the peaks yesterday were gone as if the mountain had lifted its veils to better behold her. It felt almost as if it was awaiting her, holding its breath for what was to come, knowing things were about to change.

As she kept ascending her steep, meandering path Hannah was going over and over again this latest dream. The talks with Zeus which had begun during her afternoon nap yesterday and continued in the night after a solitary meal in a restaurant down the road, the little place which Kostas had recommended.

Not a meal to remember, however she had been hungry enough to not be overly picky. What had left an impression though had been the handsome young man sitting with a cell phone a few tables away. When Hannah was halfway through her meal, he had called somebody and talked silently in some to her unknown language. It felt as if he had been eyeing her more than once during the talk.

No, imagination. These dream sequences were getting to her and more often than not did Hannah wonder what she was really up to. Upon embarking the plane to Greece had she almost turned around to go back home. However she realized that if she did, if she let 'common sense' rule, she would never know what all this was really about. She had to go the whole way. She had to know the truth. Or at least, she was willing to give it a week. Her return ticket to Stockholm was next Friday, and if she hadn't learned anything of value then, she had promised herself that she would go home and forget all about it.

She passed a small place named Prionia where a few more "Greek Gods Tourists" were climbing out of bright red Nissan van. Italians this time, sounding everything from overexcited to annoyed. Then again Italians always sounded everything from overexcited to annoyed, so she passed them by without further notice.

At the next turn of the serpent road, she found a small impromptu altar upon a boulder. Created by hands more pious than resourceful. There were prayers written on sheets of paper and weighed down with stones, some coins and candles which had gone out, some faded cut flowers and photocopied pictures of a few of the gods.

Then there was...

Reaching down she plucked up the symbol. Two crossed thunderbolts encircled by a wreath of laurel. Although the altar lay in the shadow of the high, thick spruces, the small thing seemed to reflect sunshine and it felt oddly warm against her fingers. As if someone had just taken it off. Thousands of emotions flooded through her as she held on to the charm, and she swallowed against tears.

_My family crest. Aegis of Olympos._ Zeus' voice echoed through Hannah's mind and she clasped her hand around the charm, refusing to let it go, although she had no right to take it, as it had been given to these gods, whose worship people had suddenly revived.

It had been his – hadn't it? Or at least it looked like it.

Opening her hand again, she scrutinized the charm once more. Yes, it looked exactly as the one in her dream, the one Zeus had worn. The one Zeus always had worn. So many times had she toyed with it between her fingers, so many nights had she fallen asleep in his arms and woken up with it imprinted upon her cheek.

And now it was here – why?

"Hera?"

That voice? An echo from her dreams. Could it be something more than imagination this time?

Slowly, bracing herself for disappointment, she turned around.

"Zeus? Zeus!"

Yes, it was him! Standing there resting against a pine trunk, dressed like a modern day man in black jeans and a worn leather jacket, however it was doubtlessly him. That oblique smile as he formed a heart with his hands. She would've recognized him anywhere. Everywhere.

"Zeus!" he was there, he was real, he was taking a few long leaps, reaching out – and then she was in his arms, repeating his name over and over again. Holding her, he almost squeezing the air out of her lungs.  
"Hera," he whispered, his voice the trademark blend of solemn and playful which she remembered so clearly now. "Hera, Hera – why did you have to do that? Disappearing?"  
"I don't know," she whispered into his chest, surrounded by his warmth. "All I know is that I want to be with you now and forever."


	6. Effervescence

**Effervescence**

She had no idea how long they just stood there, holding on to each other. Convincing themselves it was not a dream this time, it was real, they were finally together once more.

Hera and Zeus.

Finally they let go, ever so slightly, just to be able to face each other. To be able to talk.

"How?" they both begun. Then they laughed together. There was this consoling familiarity in his deep and joyous laughter that made her feel as if nothing could ever go wrong again. They looked at each other, uncertain of who was to begin. Then he relented, his lids fluttering just the slightest.

"How did you find me?" she asked.  
"It wasn't I. It was Hermes. He suspected you'd come here sooner or later, so he hung around, kept his eyes open, checked those Neo-Hellenics out. And yesterday he saw you in a restaurant and got in touch with me, told me you were probably planning to climb the mountain, trying to get home that way. So I came here and waited."  
"What if I'd taken another way?"  
"Sooner or later I'd found you, Hera. I always do, you know."

She remembered that now. The time he had cheated upon her, the time he had conceived Hermes with that woman Maia. She had torn up heaven and Earth before she packed her bags and left – only to have him catching up on her and begging her to return. At that time she had to admit, she would never be able to leave him. Not for real. They were too tied together.

"Honey, my memory is a wreckage," she sighed and shook her head and he let his hands play along her back, rubbing it in comforting circles.  
"Don't worry, heart of mine, we'll fix that. In fact, I believe it'll fix itself just if you get the chance to come home."  
"You defeated the Malaikins?"  
"Yes, they're gone now. Permanently this time, I believe. Athena and Ares came up with a master plan and opened up a portal to Tartarus, you know that old black hole. Opened it just as the Malaikin main force passed across. The majority of them became sucked in, however enough ships escaped for it to become a real battle. Some ass-kicking for our beloved war-lusting children."

"I told her so," Hera smiled, knowing somehow that Zeus was playing down the actual battle a bit. "I told her she would figure something out. Now, I just wonder what happened to this Portal and to this world. And where in all heavens the blue crystal went."  
"We will see if we can locate it again. Otherwise I guess Hephaestos'll just have to manufacture a new one. However far more important was retrieving you, my love. Now, let's go home!"  
"But how about – well, here? All those people?" she nodded with her head in a general direction, indicating the loud-mouthed Italians she had passed by some half an hour earlier. It felt so much longer now.  
"We will have to discuss that with the family. You and I don't solve any problems here, at the slope of Mount Olympos. Come now, my dear! There are so many waiting for you back home."

"Al right," she relented, leaning her head against his firm chest. "But you'll have to carry me, I've lost my divine powers. This body is – far from adequate."  
"Which will be all in order again as we pass through the Portal. This world has held you in stasis, but when you return home you'll shed that mortal body and become yourself. Like a butterfly from a chrysalis."

Hera picked up her discarded backpack and took it in her arms, and then she let Zeus gently lift her up and ascend into the air, carrying her as if she was a child again. In a way she felt like one, this mortal body far too vulnerable for what she wished to do with it.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤*

_Manga publisher presumed dead in Greece_

_The Manga publisher Hannah Bielke disappeared sometimes between the 4th and 15th of February 2013 in Olympia Greece, where she was on holiday alone, supposingly to partake in the Neo-Hellenic gathering beneath the Mount Olympos. Apparently she went hiking in the mountainous area and when she didn't return, the local police and rescue patrol went searching for her, without success. Bielke, who was no experienced mountaineer, was soon believed to have fallen down some chasm and perished, however no body has been found. _

_Bielke was the sole owner of the small publishing company Bou-ken, specializing in Japanese Manga. Bou-ken was doing fairly well and according to Bielke's friends, there was no reason to believe her presumed death to be anything but an accident. Bielke, has no close relatives and left no will, so her estate, including the publishing company will be inherited by her maternal uncles. _

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤*

There it was, on the other side of the portal. The blue semi-sphere which was Olympia – a gem more treasured than all the wealth on old Earth, because it was the home of her heart. Olympia, not a planet or moon in the normal sense, but a single floating rock evolving around the planet of Aragirian, a satellite bound by magic forces rather than regular gravity. Aragirian was a bit larger and with much fewer clouds than the Earth she knew from the NASA pictures, and it was surrounded by three moons. Seen from the Portal it was half lit, however Olympia had moved into the day side and was almost fully bathed in light, and Hera knew it was early morning in her home.

Then there were the stars, so much more of them than in the place where Earth was. Aragirian and its sun were far nearer a galaxy center than Earth, with many stars shining only light months away. Stars visible even in daylight down on Aragirian.

Zeus entered the atmosphere of the Olympia orb and dived trough it with the ease of someone who had done this so many times before, and as Hera felt her strength return, she asked him to let her go, so she could fly on her own and to finally taste the liberty of not being bound by gravity but only use it to make the descent easier. Thus they were going hand in hand the last leg down, and Hera felt deeply moved when she spotted the familiar rolling green hills by the Indigo Lough, the long sandy beaches and the brilliantly coloured buildings climbing the lush hills.

As cut out of a wish came true, Hera beheld her and Zeus's home on the highest top, built in white, with accents in blue and gold and partly covered by a gilded roof, carried by rows and rows of pillars and glittering in the slanted sunlight. Surrounding it were the terraced gardens with the lake, the ponds and the waterfalls. And thousands of blossoming flowers. It felt as if she could already sense their fragrances even though she knew she was too far away still.

Around that magnificent place the last of the night mists were being whiskered away and revealing all those small details of the garden. The statues, the small paths, the lanterns. The tiny gazebos, the fountains and the perpetually blossoming trees.

Returning to Olympos filled her with the effervescence of a calf in pasture land. Regaining her immortal body was just part of it, even though it felt like recovering from an excruciating and prolonged decease. What seemed her more important was getting her memories back. Hera had laughed then cried then laughed again as they finally set foot on the large roof-less terrace in front of the house. The extended living room with its plush furniture, potted flowers, colourful carpets, singing fountains, and crystal chandeliers suspended in midair.

With a sense of boundless relief, Hera dropped her awkward backpack and let Zeus grab her and swing her around in a joyous rave underneath the chandeliers, while she was going over and over again all those things which was important to her.

Him not the least, and the love they shared. The love, which had taken its battering and beating over the years but always emerging stronger, healthier and more ready to take on another aspect of reality. Seeing that well known face again, the reflections from the crystals in the chandeliers twirling over it as they danced, it was a true sign that she had found herself home again. For Hera, home would always be where Zeus was, because he held her heart in his hands.

Beyond him waited her children. There were Athena, Ares, Hephaestus, Dionysos and Hebe. As did the other four, her step children, the ones who she had learned to love as well over the years. Apollo, Artemis, Persephone and Hermes. There were Zeus' sister Hestia, there were Poseidon and Demeter, Leto and Astraios, Hecate and Hades. And all the rest.

Hera re-encountered her daughter in law Aphrodite, the lovely girl whom Poseidon had found by the sea-shore of the Aragirian island Kypheria. Back then she had been a teenager with memory-loss. She recalled Dionysos' strange faith of having been born trice and by three different mothers, first by Dione – who had no memory of it whatsoever, then by someone named Semele, whom nobody could recall, and finally by herself.

She also remembered hearing how Hades had brought Hestia, Poseidon and Demeter trough death and back, to protect them from being annihilated by Cronos. It had been risky, however the alternative had been worse, better to have died than to never have been born at all.

When the overwhelming experience had faded and Hera had re-settled in the place where she really belonged, she finally understood how so many members of her family and her friends must have felt when they had been torn out from their realities and hurled down somewhere else. She understood the emotions running through the mind of Leto that day, when she encountered her grown-up children. The twins she couldn't remember having birthed, because it had happened in another time-world, where she and Zeus had been lovers. A time-world, which Cronos had destroyed. Not to mention how the poor Apollo and Artemis must have felt when they met parents who didn't remember them.

Hera harked back to what it had been like.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤**

It had been a bit more than three centuries ago – Olympian time scale, when they had just opened up the Portal to the world which was Earth. Earth, which universe was located between Hera's home Aragirian and the war-damaged Leolorian. Back then Earth had been pristine and oddly undamaged by Cronos and his rampaging. It was a rough and rustic world, not as refined as Aragirian, Elysium and Narivo. Or destroyed as Leolorian or Khazier had been. It had breathed of promises and future, with a mortal population not far from the industrialized era, perhaps a bit violent and crude but with intelligence and creativity to match the humans of the older worlds.

Here, the Olympians would be able to start anew. Build up a new world, create a society that could withstand wars and terror. Dawn these people into a civilization of humanness and philosophy. Turn them from warriors to thinkers, from destroyers to creators, from slaughterers to artists.

The Portal had been opened up over a mountain a bit higher than the rest, on the easternmost of three large islets poking out in a large sea basin. It had been a fairly populated and objectively civilized area in a nice climate, and the proud and gallant people there had referred to themselves as Hellenes.

The Olympians had soon understood that contrary to what they first presumed, this world had been affected by the Titanomachy. There were faint memories of the Titan Cronos and of Zeus' defeat of the same. There were even mentions of Hera, Poseidon and a few of the others. However it wasn't until their arrival in a town called Delphi they really understood how significantly the hand of war had touched this world.

Delphi was not much more than a sanctuary, brightly painted temples and shrines located on a mountain-slope with the most magnificent view over the landscape beneath and beyond. Mountains clad with lush greenery surrounded a narrow ravine, and at the end of the chasm a blue bay could be seen glittering in the sun. The air was warm without being too hot, since it was still rather early in the morning. Drops of dew were gleaning on leaves, grass and spider webs and mists lingered down in the depths of the ravine. In a way it reminded Hera of Fevoriga on Aragirian, a place which she had visited in her youth.

Here in Delphi resided the Pythia, a priestess which was said to know the means of mentally cutting through the currents of time and behold possible futures. The Olympians had heard of Oracles before, beings with those strange capacities were said to have been at work on Aragirian a long time ago. These Oracles were even said to have foreseen the Titanomacy including the outcome of it. But to find an Oracle here, on Earth, that was incomprehensible, and thus Zeus had asked Hera and Leto to look into it.

However arriving in this little pretty town they had been in for an even greater surprise. A surprise in form of the god residing there.

Not expecting anything more than some mortals with supernatural powers, Hera and Leto had landed at the edge of the sanctuary, coated in invisibility. A precaution to not have to face any mortals, or they might risk being stuck there helping people out. Especially Leto, who couldn't let a child with an abrasion go unhealed. Soon the two friends were making their way past small congregations of mortals and up towards the grand temple where the Pythia resided. Once again, Hera marveled over how much the architecture of these sanctuaries reminded her of her home. It was the same rectangular or circular structures, rows of pillars carrying slightly sloping roofs.

The Goddesses had reached about half way there when there was someone calling out to them in an aggressive voice.  
"Halt!" the man was ordering. "Not a move, or I'll shoot!"

Hera rose her hands in the universal sign of being unarmed and without ill intent, before she turned around, facing a blue-clad deity with a bow, aiming a strung arrow at them. A man who looked like he could use this exotic weapon and would no doubt do so if he felt it necessary.  
"Who are you, daring to trespass the holy ground of Delphi?" he kept on, and Hera amazed over the familiarity of the voice. He sounded almost like her Zeus, however there was a more melodic timbre to his bass, as if he was used to sing rather than barking out orders like this.

"We are Hera and Leto from Olympos," Hera replied. "We come in peace, with a desire to learn a bit about this place of marvels."  
"Leto? Olympos?" there was a slight tremor in the voice of the god, however no other than a trained ear would have heard it, and Hera noted a faint tremble of the arrow, sunlight shivering upon the edge metal.

"Yes," her friend said, taking an hesitating step forward, her green, knee-long silk robe billowing backwards in the wind and showing off her tomboyish form. "I am Leto." Once again, the god's appearance wavered, Hera sensing the clear consternation and surprise emitting from him.  
"Mother?" now he lowered his bow, and Hera noted how much he looked like her husband as well. Same lithe, fair-skinned body, same blond curls with a mind of their own, same sparkling blue eyes, brimming with intelligence, kindness and curiosity – and with that same deep sadness Zeus' eyes had held the first time she had met him. Eyes directed at Leto as if he couldn't believe what he was seeing.

"Do I.. know you?" Leto's voice held the same dismay, and she reached out to Hera for comfort. Taking Leto's slender hand, Hera glanced at her before facing the Zeus lookalike again.  
"Yes – it's me! Apollo!" the god was saying, raising his long-fingered hand slightly, in a gesture as if he wanted to reach out and touch Leto, assure himself that she was actually there – however not really daring.

"Apollo?" there was something in Leto's voice as well, as if she was struggling for reminiscence.  
"Yes, mother! Don't you recognize me? I admit eight years is a long time, and I've grown from an adolescent with too long legs and arms into a man. So has Artemis, in fact she looks the same as you, save for being taller."  
"I..." Leto clasped Hera's hand almost desperately while shaking her head in confusion and despair, because this beautiful man was apparently claiming to be her son, just as it was obvious she had no idea who he was – or this Artemis. Hence Hera understood what has happened.

"Who is your father?" she queried.  
"It's Zeus," Apollo said, shifting his eyes to Hera, and she saw them widen. "And you're Hera," suddenly his stance was all hostile. She saw the fist of his right hand clench the bow again, for some reason his feelings towards her were hostile. Thus she knew she had to take control of this situation fast, before it fell apart. "Apollo!" adding command to her voice she locked her eyes with his, once again marveling over their likeness with her husband's. "I hear what you're saying, claiming Leto your mother. However a lot has happened during the time she has been away. The situation is far from straightforward. I want you to go fetch Artemis. And find a place where we all can sit down. Because we have things to discuss."

"I don't take order from you in any way, Hera!" Apollo snarled. "And you don't have to either, mother! This jealous woman has been nothing but mean to you! She has no right..."  
"Apollo," Leto pleaded. "Hera is right. You need to listen to us. We have a long story to tell. Of a world far away where cruel things happened, which tore you and your sister from me and from Zeus – and obviously Zeus and me apart as well. And Hera is without blame here."  
"But..."  
"Go and fetch Artemis, we need to talk," Leto's voice was more pleading than ordering, and Apollo inhaled as if to say something, then he simply hid his face in his hands, his bow falling to the ground with a rattling sound.

"Dear?" Now Leto let go of Hera, and took the few steps over to the man who had obviously been birthed by her in another time-world. Placing her hand on his shoulder she continued talking to him. "Look at me, Apollo," she besought.  
"You don't remember me, do you?" his blue eyes were brimming with tears now.  
"Somehow I do," Leto all but whispered. "Faint traces of dreams hold your name. And your sister's. Twins, born on the floating island. But fate has been brutal to all of us, and we need to tell you what happened. It's not your fault, my dear child! Now take your bow, and come, let's go find your sister and then we'll talk!"

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

The warm water was calming against her skin, brought her into a relaxing trance, where she lied with her eyes almost closed, breathing in the fragrances of herbs and perfume, felt the soft vapor caress and wet her cheeks. All she saw was the orange of the dimmed lanterns and the blue-green from the lit basin. She more sensed than heard Zeus' presence as he slid down in the water to her.

"Hera?" he moved up close to her and laid his arm around her wet shoulders and she moaned pleasantly and rested her head on his chest, her damp curls wetting him. "How do you feel now?"  
"Much better," she truthfully assured. "A bit tired, but much better. For some reason the recollection of when we found Apollo and Artemis came over me. The talk we had with them. The tears of Leto and the twins. How terrible it felt for her to not really remember them. It was the same for me as Hannah, I could hardly remember you more than in faint dreams."

"I know what you mean, beloved," Zeus said, toying with her hair. "I've lost so many time-worlds, some which I remember, some which I don't. And every loss is unique. Every vanished memory different. Sometimes you can retrieve them, other times not. And I don't really know what's affecting it."  
"I think I do now."  
"What?" she felt him stiffen slightly with surprise and anticipation.  
"I think that if you are brought back to that time-world which you was torn from, your memories return as well. But sometimes you cannot go back, and then, those memories remain gone. You and Leto couldn't go back to the world where you had conceived Apollo and Artemis and where she had birthed them, so you did not remember them when we rediscovered them."

"I believe you're right, Hera, I never thought of it that way before. However in the case of the twins it doesn't really matter anymore. I learned to know them and to love them as the great persons they are. Then whatever Leto and I might have had, I'm sure it was fine. And while I may regret that it's gone, I'm positive it was nothing like what you and I have. Twin-soul of mine."  
"Oh you just dare think otherwise, "she suddenly laughed and sat up in the bath, facing her beloved.

"Are you threatening me?" Zeus smirked and Hera felt the effervescence start to sing in the blood.  
"Perhaps," she replied. "It depends how willing you are to take up the gauntlet."  
"After 45 days, a lot!"  
"Try eight years!" she challenged and cupped water in her hands before hurling it in his face.  
"I suppose I can," he said before returning the wet bestowment. The next moment they were splashing at each other, laughing like little kids, before Zeus suddenly surprised her by taking her in his arms and kissing her fervently. Responding with all her penned up emotions, Hera both felt how incredibly much she had missed this and oddly enough as if she had never been away. As if it was yesterday eve they bathed together the last time.


	7. Luminescence

**Luminescence**

One by one the gods of Olympos gathered in the circular agora, sitting down on soft coaches, making themselves comfortable while talking gently among each other, silk whispering and jewelry gleaming as they moved about. Some were sampling food and drinks from a set table in a corner, others were browsing through notebooks, scribbling something perhaps. However the talk died down as Zeus and Hera arrived, settling themselves at the head end, still holding hands. Soon the only things heard were the chirping of birds and singing of the waterfall in the garden outside and the silent crackling from the fire in the hearth.

Then Zeus stood up, facing the gathering of deities for a short moment before addressing them.  
"My fellow Olympians," he began. "We're all overjoyed to have Hera back here with us, however the happiest one is of course she," Zeus turned to glance at his beloved before continuing, directing a gentle smile at her sweet, relaxed face. "Nonetheless, she has not failed to point out that the story does not end here. We still have Earth to attend to. 3000 years of neglect has turned that world into a miserable place, since it wasn't ready to be left to its own devises when the Portal closed. Accidently that world was hurled 3000 years forwards in time, including Hera, who's essence became trapped within the body of one of those mortals down there. She's more or less recovered now, her memory has returned and proven mostly intact. Still we need to right what is wrong down there."

"I can feel the question 'how' being born on several lips now. Wait with that, we will discuss it, but we cannot deal with everything at a time. There are wars being fought down there, some of the most awful kind, which would have made even the Nersiadan's chocked, and we can all agree that these beings were rotten to the core by millennia of tyranny. There is a brewing environmental disaster, there's crime and neglect, there's poverty of horrible magnitudes and destruction and furnaces of violence almost wherever you turn. However it's not all hopeless, there are some untouched places, there are still groups out there wanting to do good, there are gatherings of influential people who struggle to turn the ship around."

"Most of all, there are some hundreds of people down there who call themselves Neo-Hellenes. The most sensitive and receptive people on Earth have somehow recognized our presence and revived the worship of our pantheon. A faith which got lost when the contact between our realms was broken and prayers turned futile. We can begin with this group, use them as ambassadors at the same time as we try to affect those others."

"We should of course also discuss the best way to actually reveal ourselves to the mortals of Earth. Since we have been lost to them for so many years, it's not an easy deed, it'll be nothing like paying a Narivo monarch a visit or speaking to the Congress of Elysium. Earth lacks a formal world government, they are too disintegrated for that. There is an assembly, the UN, but without any real power. Hera describes it as nothing more than a cross between a conversation club and money gorging monster. So my embryo of a plan is to start with those Neo-Hellenes. Approach them first, because they are already expecting us. Then work usselves through the rest of the population. It will not take a week or a month, perhaps not even a year is enough. But every journey starts at home, so naturally this one starts here."

As Zeus handed over the word, the expected wild chatter exploded and then calmed down before some kind of sequence of speakers was formed.

Meanwhile Hera felt that she was not yet ready to partake in the sometimes overheated Olympian debates, so she closed her eyes and let another recollection wash over her.

_Hera found herself dropping the primary blue crystal and seeing it roll away from her down the tuft-covered hillside, pulled by gravity into the chasm below.  
__"No!" she reached out to grasp it, but too late, and as it fell away, a flash of blue sapphire light blinded her before she closed her eyes._

_Only to open them as churning water flooded over her head – and then withdrew, leaving her face down in the sand on the beach of Kao Lak, Thailand, wet grit grinding against her forehead and cheeks. Coughing and vomiting water, she rose on hands and knees in the muddy sand, disorientation sweeping in nauseating waves over her, making her tremble. Oh dear, what had really happened? She remembered the water withdrawing from the sand, she remembered the little Thai man calling out to them to run run run. She remembered that immense wall of water! She remembered..._

_"Mother?"_

_Around her water swirled. Up was down and down was up._

_"Father?"_

_"I love you, my strong and brave Queen," the handsome stranger whispered. "Always will. Be careful!"_

_"Joly? Little brother?"_

_It was night, first all she had seen was blackness, but when she gazed to her left she saw the faint luminescence of the few electric lamps still working. She tried to stand up, but fell again._

_Luminescence? Stars? Beloved, half his face hidden in shadow..._

_Then she heard voices call out and hands reaching for her, firm hands grabbing her under her arms.  
"Missus?"  
"You aw right?"  
"You hurt?"  
"Can you walk?"  
"Will sumefone get a doctol!"_

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤*

"You're always playing the doctor with the remedy, Apollo!" Persephone's sharp voice cut through Hera's recollections. "But in this case the patient is terminal. Face it, we cannot fix that world. It's beyond fixing. Let it die!"  
"How can you be so cold-hearted?" Aphrodite raged. "There are seven billion souls down there, and you mean we shall not help them? How can we doom them because of a Portal accident? Which wasn't even their fault."  
"Sometimes you have to let the hopeless cases die, to help the curable ones," Persephone insisted.

"And who are you intending to help in their stead, Persephone?" Aphrodite's anger was almost tangible as she faced her sister in law, her cheeks blossoming even without the help of make-up this time as her lavender eyes shot rays across the room. "People you suddenly found out you can reach out and aid? Because you haven't exactly been the epitome of helpfulness earlier."  
"That's none of your business, so shut your painted mouth," Persephone shot back. "I will not spend a second on that miserable globe!"  
"No, you rather go to the Deathlands, I take it!" the Love Goddess scorned.

"Come on!" Hermes interjected with raised voice. "We have been reduced to dowdy athlete's games! If only for our pride's sake do we need to take that planet back!"  
"I personally will do my best to help the Earthlings," Athena was standing up. "Then Persephone, Hades, Hephaestos and all the rest of you can do whatever your conscience tells you!"

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤*

_"What's your name, Miss?" the young doctor who had been examining her asked.  
"I... I don't really remember. H... something?"  
"Where do you stay?"  
"Um... Olymp... Oh, my head, I can't remember!"_

_Luminescent balls dancing in front of her face and she squeezed her eyes shut. Wanting it all to end._

_"You clearly suffer from a concussion, dear. If you recall your name or where you are staying, perhaps we can locate your family."_

_Zeus?_

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

"Hera, are you okay?" Zeus asked gently, taking her hand.  
"Sort of, it's a bit too intense right now. I think I need a break, I'm going to take a short walk out in the garden."  
"You want me to come with you?"  
"Ever the considerate. No, my love, it's not necessary," she smiled as she stood and let go of his hand. "Stay and take care of the kindergarten will you!"  
"It's a tough job but someone's got to do it." That was a one-liner Zeus had picked up on Earth and which he somehow found applicable to his own situation.

Hera giggled silently, soon she was stepping out between two pillars and down four steps before her bare feet touched the soft grass and her nostrils became filled with the musty fragrances of earth mixing with sweet flower scent. She turned her face towards the sun and let it caress her face, inhaling the fresh air of her homeland. Right now her old life felt so far away, hardly more than a vivid dream, however she was convinced she would never entirely forget Hannah Bielke.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

_"Hannah," suddenly the name came to her. "I'm Hannah Bielke, from Stockholm Sweden. I'm staying with my parents and brother in Jasmine Gardens."_

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

Sitting down by the pond, she watched the gold fishes there, how lazily they swam, how the sun reflected in their scaled bodies. Thousands of bright spots danced across the pond and when she shut her eyes they turned green on her retinas. She listened to the waterfall, thinking of how peculiar it was that while Hera found streaming water calming, it had always upset Hannah Bielke. However taking Thailand '04 in mind, it was not that strange.

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

_The tsunami had swept in and turned paradise to hell, transformed Thai tourist towns to wreckage. And in the midst the family Bielke from Stockholm, Sweden had been one of the many victims. While Ulf, Madeleine and Joly Bielke had been swept away by the unrelenting streams, the daughter Hannah had somehow been flushed ashore, the sole survivor. How she really endured was something of a miracle, since she had apparently been long enough under water to not reasonably being able to make it. However something had saved her, had brought her ashore and back to life again._

_But when Hanna two weeks later embarked the plane back home to Stockholm again, she wasn't so sure she could consider herself lucky. She had lost her whole family, she was all alone in the whole wide world now. She had nobody and there was nobody who had her. On top of that the concussion she had suffered from kept manifesting itself in strange ways. Most of what had happened during the three days in Thailand before the tsunami was gone. There were only faint, dreamlike recollections of having a seafood dinner at a pier and playing badminton with her father._

_There were also dreams about a man telling her to be careful. What had he warned her about? The coming wave? Hannah kept feeling that there was something more than her family she had lost. She saw herself reach out for something blue. Something beautiful and important._

_And what hurt the most? She hadn't been able to say farewell. To her father and little brother. Her mother..._

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

"Mother?" Athena's voice broke through Hera's remembrance. "How are you really feeling? You had us worried in there."  
"I'm fine, Athena," she looked up at her blonde daughter, who sat down in front of her at the edge of the pond, sliding playfully with her left hand over the surface, drawing ephemeral lines in the water. The sun made her hair luster as if it was on fire, it wasn't as curly as Zeus', nor was it Hera's straight hair, but it had its own unique waviness, like rollers on the sea. Otherwise that lovely girl was so much alike her father that Hera would have doubted having anything to do with her genes, had she not herself plucked the baby out of her womb.

"I'm just a bit tired," she reassured after a second of silence. "Still disoriented. After all the things I've been through – It's hard to explain, you have to live it."  
"What happened really?" the ever curious goddess asked, her radiantly blue eyes both caring and eager for pristine knowledge of how the human mind worked.  
"I don't really know, my physical form was somehow rendered unstable for a while. My soul and my spirit fell through thousands of years and subsequently for some reason managed to inhabit the body of a dying woman. A mortal human drowning in a disaster down on Earth. I sort of borrowed her form for a while, including memories."

"I never thought such a thing to be possible," Athena said thoughtfully, and Hera could tell her brilliant mind was fervently at work now, trying to solve another mystery. "Besides the race memory, which resides within our genes, I always assumed memories were connected to the soul, not to the body."  
"Apparently they can be, or perhaps I was able to copy hers."  
"Do you still have them?"  
"Yes, but they seem more unreal now than earlier. I'm not forgetting, but – it's like having watched a theatre play. Engaging for the time being but not really important any longer when the curtain falls. So did you come to a decision?" Hera changed topic, feeling she was over the discussion of her Earthly life. For now at least.

"Yes," Athena said. "We're going down. At least some of us. I feel I want to do it. And so do Apollo and Artemis, they were after all born there. Aphrodite is coming too and when I left she was working hard on luring Ares down. However with all those wars going on there, I'd think he do more damage than good. Hermes and Poseidon are also coming, but I think it's more out of curiosity than a pure desire to help. However Persephone and Hephaestos don't see a point. And Dionysos, Hebe and a handful more haven't made up their minds yet."  
"And Zeus?" Hera asked.

"He says GO! I think he has a bit of a conscience added to that decision. He feels somehow responsible for the accident with the Portal."  
"But he should not be," Hera said. "It wasn't his fault. It was nobody's fault really. Besides, the alternative might have been worse. Having the Malaikin attacking the Earth of 3000 years back. They would have annihilated it! Or at least destroyed large parts of it. Now, we 'only' need to fix the things the mortals messed up on their own."

"I've seen it," Athena sighed. "Apparently they did a good job messing it up."  
"You got that right, dear," Hera said. "That place sure needs a make-over."

"So this is where you hiding, miladies" Zeus said as he came striding towards them. Behind him Hera saw Artemis discussing something eagerly with her husband Orion, while their twin daughters seemed fully intend on jumping into the pond, just to retrieve their parents' attention. In the shades of an oak a bit away Athena's daughter Nike was sitting in the grass together with Iris and Selene, sharing a carafe of wine.

She also heard Dionysos' happy-go-lucky laughter mingling with Helios roaring out a protest against something and Poseidon's rumbling assertions. The only thing unfamiliar in fact was the dark-skinned goddess Apollo's son Asklepios was flirting with. So little had really changed here since she left, Hera though. Then again, it was her own perspectives which were askew.

Zeus took her hand and kissed it gently before squatting in front of them.  
"We're having a short break now, then we are going to start making a real plan for going down to Earth," he said. "I've been thinking some, while the discussion ran on repeat a while. How about using dreams?"  
"As in talking to them through their dreams?" Hera asked, remembering that woman in the TV-sofa and the Facebook group. "It sounds like a great idea in fact."

"I agree," Athena said, "but we must prepare those dreams well. Oh, here comes Apollo!" she then said, her eyes shifting from Hera and to her right. The next moment the God of Reason let up his voice.  
"Hera?" he asked. "I'm a bit curious about that woman you inhabited during your years on Earth."  
"Yes," Hera responded warily, hating to be torn from the main subject just like this. "What is it you wish to know exactly?"

"How did it work really? This transfer into a mortal body and then back into yourself again?"  
"Oh," Hera sighed and shook her head. "Honestly, I don't really know."  
"Can't you see, my mother doesn't want to talk about it," Athena scolded her half-brother at the same time.  
"But..." Apollo's shoulders slumped, he was just as curious as his younger sister and Hera was sure that if he hadn't asked, she would have to explain the same things to Athena instead later. Then she got an idea, like a flash out of a clear sky it came to her what she was going to barter.

"Apollo, it's quite a bit to go through," she told. "Will take perhaps an afternoon. But I'll do it, if you do me a favour in return."  
"Yes," her stepson looked as if he was ready to promise her the sun, and she couldn't help smile at that expression of eagerness.  
"In Stockholm, Sweden there is a woman named Agnetha Anund. 33 years old, a mother of 3 – and with terminal cancer. Can you heal her, then I promise you I'll tell you all and everything you wish to know about Hannah Bielke."

"Deal!" Apollo almost made a salute, before he spun around and more or less leaped back into the house, nearly colliding with Demeter as he made the ascent up the stairs. The goddess of harvests turned after him with a snort, however he paid her no heed.

Now, Zeus was beaming at her.  
"Hera, Hera, that was a very noble thing to do. Who is that woman?"  
"The best friend of Hannah Bielke. The real Hannah Bielke. They had known each other since the age of five. So naturally I got to know her as well. A wonderful woman. I know we cannot and are not supposed to help all poor souls down there. But Agnetha was special to me. I just can't let her die at such young age and in such a wile way."

"True," Zeus said and took her in his arms. "My Hera, no matter whoever you were those years down on Earth, you've always been a queen in your heart. I'm so glad to have you back with me again."

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤¤0¤0¤0¤0¤¤0¤0¤0¤0¤

In Bromma, Stockholm an orange Thai lantern had gotten stuck among the branches of a huge elm. It had hung there now for weeks, and the children used to point it out, making bets on how long it would remain before someone plucked it out of the tree. From a thread hung a note, the ink on it almost fading away by the rain. However it read one single world. _Health_.

At the hospital of Karolinska, Stockholm Agnetha Anund opened up her eyes. She was well now, cured from her cancer, however she didn't know that yet.

In Olympia Greece, Kostas Amarakis was counting money. His hotel had been fully booked since this Olympos craze had begun, and he was doing better than ever now on his life's autumn. Lifting his eyes, he faced the small statuette there of a god with wings on his shoes. Hermes, god of merchants and of trade. And wasn't the statue smirking slightly at him? As if they shared a secret?

¤0¤0¤0¤0¤¨* The End *¨¤0¤0¤0¤0¤


End file.
